Newton bakery crawl today and Saturday; village day office hours Sunday

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

Bakery Crawl - Ward 5 Locations

The organization All Over Newton, which promotes local food establishments, has set up a "bakery crawl" today (9/29) and tomorrow (9/30) at 20 different local bakeries and cafes around Newton. You can find the full list and details on their website, and I also like many of the places on the full list, but in this newsletter I'll just note the three Ward 5 spots and details here. (All three are participating both days. Some locations elsewhere are only participating one day or the other.)

Maybe I'll see some of you at one of them today or tomorrow! I already enjoy the treats and full meals at Bettina's and Little Luke's, and I've been looking for an excuse to check out White Lion.

Bettina's Bakery - Newton Upper Falls 295 Elliot Street * Fri: 7-3; Sat: 8-3 ~ For those who love scratch-made, seasonal, freshly baked pies, Bettina’s Bakery Upper Falls is a must. Among their other diverse offerings, during the Crawl the bakery will have smaller sized apple, blueberry and pumpkin pies for sale and free samples of each. Bettina's will also offer $3 off any bakery purchases over $15 for Crawlers. Bettina's is the only eatery in Newton where German, Latino, and American tastes blend together, where customers enjoy conchas, cubanos, horchata, streuselkuchen, and schnitzel along with their turkey sandwiches and salads.

Little Luke's Cafe Newton - Upper Falls 1225 Chestnut Street * Fri: 6:30-2; Sat: 8-3 ~ During the Bakery Crawl Little Lukes is offering a 2 for 1 special on all single serve bakery items, including their scratch-made Greek baked goods like Baklava, Finikia and Kourabiedes (butter cookies tossed in powdered sugar) and over-sized muffins in flavors like pistachio, cappuccino, morning glory and pumpkin, that fly out the door. Opening a few months ago in the former location of The Depot at the corner of Chestnut and Oak Streets, Little Lukes has quickly become a popular casual breakfast and lunch spot, offering hardy breakfasts, top shelf sandwiches, and, of course, baked goods. With a few indoor tables, a large, outdoor patio with lots of umbrella’d tables, ample parking, and a prime location on the walkable greenway, it’s the perfect spot to dine, stroll, and even work in a game of bocce on the next-door public court.

White Lion Baking Company - Waban 95 Wyman St * Fri & Sat: 7:45-4 ~White Lion Baking Company in Waban has opened our eyes to just how tasty and satisfying gluten-free and grain-free baked goods can be. This scratch-made bakery is a destination for those with special diets (Celiac Disease, Food Allergies, Paleo, Keto, Dairy-free and Vegan), while its baked goods made from wholesome, minimally processed, and organic ingredients, are a hit with even the most discriminating bakery-goers. Waban is White Lion’s second location—you may have visited their other bakery in Mashpee. Owner Liz Miles, a former pastry chef at Upstairs at the Pudding and Lumiere, is eager for the community to taste White Lion’s menu, and is offering free samples to “crawlers,” on both Friday and Saturday. 10% of the bakery’s proceeds during the Crawl will be donated to the Newton Food Pantry.

Upper Falls Village Day Office Hours on Sunday

As I am every year, I will be set up with a pushcart booth at Upper Falls Village Day this Sunday, October 1, from 11 AM to 2 PM in front of the Greenway, at the end of Chestnut St.

Please come on by and say hello, and perhaps I can assist you with questions on citywide issues or neighborhood concerns.

September is Recovery Month

September is Recovery Month each year since 1989 -- but it's a year-round matter of interest for us all. On September 15, I attended the annual overdose memorial flags ceremony at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Ward 5. There were 2,357 more lives lost in Massachusetts last year. But many of the speakers and those present were people who had found their way to recovery and rebuilt their lives. The key message of the event: Hope isn't lost for those who are struggling, but silence and isolation don't work against addiction. Only community and support amongst our fellow human beings can save lives. Let's carry that into the coming 12 months.

Statement on Deferred Revenues by City Councilor Bill Humphrey as Chair of Progressive Newton

Sign up to receive Ward and political newsletters by email here. To join the Progressive Newton email list, sign up here.

The long-awaited release of deferred revenues from legal complications represents an opportunity, but Mayor Fuller’s proposed financial plan is not the best or most appropriate use of the money. The Mayor ought to consult first with the City Council and the public to solicit a wider range of proposals and engage in a more collaborative analysis of the trade-offs under consideration. That is exactly why the Mayor voluntarily consulted with Councilors and the public about the use of one-time ARPA funding from the federal government.
 
Newton’s long-term fiscal security is dependent on public confidence. Our revenue strength depends on the attractiveness of our properties and public willingness to vote through permanent operating revenue increases from time to time. If the voting public believes that the City of Newton and the Newton Public Schools are no longer delivering on core services and catching up on deferred critical maintenance in a visible, tangible way, they will not vote for additional operating revenues. If that cycle continues, Newton properties will only be attractive to residents who do not plan to make any use of city services or our education system.
 
The announcement of the deferred revenues becoming available finally may leave voters with an erroneous impression that ongoing operating revenues from an override were not necessary and that the administration has been concealing funds. In reality, there is still an undeniable need for more permanent operating revenues in order to help resolve the contract with the teachers and to meet the inflationary challenges of maintaining a steady level of city services. (We stand in solidarity with our public employees who are no longer being paid competitively.) But the voters made clear during the unsuccessful override referendum campaign, and in the years leading up to that election, that they wanted the city to prioritize catching up on addressing long-deferred problems, especially around infrastructure quality and safety, to prove that things are still going in the right direction, so that they were not throwing good money after bad.
 
If the city had had access to these revenues when they were supposed to be received originally, we would simply have spent them towards the annual budget each year in a more traditional manner. Instead, with access to these funds denied until now, the city and NPS made hard choices about deferring expenditures. It follows logically that these funds should now be used to address these problems finally.
 
The Mayor may believe that pension pre-funding is identical to deferred maintenance of physical infrastructure and assets, but it is not. In fact, the city’s future ability to pay for pension obligations depends entirely on the political willingness of the residents to continue increasing revenues over the long run. The city’s finances are not separable from the political opinions of the electorate. We need to prioritize visible improvements to the City in the current fiscal year to restore confidence as fast as possible.
 
A financial Rube Goldberg Machine use of deferred revenues, not even beginning in the current fiscal year, aimed primarily at future pension payouts, with theoretical but negligible spillover benefits to the Newton Public Schools, does not address the present-day disinvestment crisis, nor does it actually eliminate the need for additional long-term revenues. 
 
We are hopelessly behind the curve on roads maintenance, to say nothing of road safety improvement projects. This affects everyone’s daily life and reduces public morale. Despite road quality being the number one issue, and the number one cause of falling confidence in city government, once again excessive pension pre-funding for the future is being prioritized over fixing our roads in the here and now. Likewise, some of the funding could be used to address the urgent parent concerns about school staffing levels this academic year, even if this one-time funding pool is not a long-term solution. (Pending developments across the city are expected to begin generating additional permanent revenues in a few years anyway, however.)
 
Disinvestment from the present day is not the fiscally responsible course of action, because political considerations and public confidence cannot be separated from future financial health. It might be tempting to think that every windfall can be used to smooth out a future shortfall, but the City of Newton is not a private business. We are given public resources one fiscal year at a time, and we are not given these resources for the purposes of asset investment management. The public expects us to fix holes in the roads and schools today with this money, not potential holes in the budget years from now.
 
Making one-time catch-up surges of funding in the present-day is a valid form of investing in our community and building public confidence that translates into future revenues. The public deserves a say in how this delayed revenue is spent.

Public Hearings This Month on Tree Protection and Historic Preservation

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

As a childhood Gath Pool devotee and as a City Councilor, it was an honor and a blast to attend the city's grand finale Pool Party free swim on Friday this past week before the leaky, venerable municipal institution is demolished and replaced with a fantastic new outdoor swimming and water recreation facility next year.

Ward 5 residents might be interested in commenting at two virtual public hearings this month, one on proposed updates to Newton’s tree protection ordinance (this Wednesday 8/16 at 7 PM at Programs & Services Committee) and a local landmark nomination for the “Strong Block” of Waban Square (next Thursday 8/24 at 7 PM at the Newton Historical Commission). I have been heavily involved in both of these efforts, which I am summarizing in today’s newsletter.

Tree Protection

The Programs & Services Committee has been working since last year on possible revisions to the City of Newton’s ordinance on tree protection, primarily focusing new measures on trees located on private property. This has generated a wide range of passionate opinions and it has been our task as a committee to hammer out a viable and meaningful compromise that can pass and be effectively enforced. The agenda document for Wednesday’s committee Zoom meeting includes a detailed summary of the latest proposals, beginning on page 36, as well as a copy of the latest text, beginning on page 41. We are fully anticipating making further edits based on public comments and other feedback, but we are fairly close to a final proposal.

Below I have written my own summary of the broad strokes:

Under the proposal, there would be significantly more protections for (and fees related to) cutting down large trees on properties under construction (particularly for developers who do not reside at the property in question), but there would still be fee exemptions for residents of single-family or two-family lots who are not doing construction at the time or within 18 months.

Neighboring trees on an abutter lot would now be protected (by ordinance anyway) from construction-related damage to the root systems, etc. Developers or homeowners doing construction would need to submit more plans for vetting to demonstrate appropriate protections especially along property boundaries.

Although abutting property owners would still not have any rights to appeal tree removals on neighboring properties, there would be a new public notification system to abutters of properly filed tree removal permits. This would (we hope) have three benefits: one, it would offer an opportunity for a neighborly conversation about upcoming tree removals; two, it will help reduce chances of damage to nearby trees across property lines; three, if an abutter does not receive notification but notices an imminent tree removal, they will be able to call it in to Newton’s Forestry Division and prevent illegal and unpermitted tree removals.

Dead or dying trees can be removed without a fee. Trees can also be pruned without a permit (within reason, as defined by clearer standards).

We are still debating whether or not the ordinance should have special fee exemptions for removing mature but non-native invasive trees, such as Norway Maples.

Removal of mature trees will either require replacement with new trees (and five-year maintenance of them to ensure survival) or paying a replacement fee to the city that factors in the costs of replacing those trees and maintaining them for their early years, as well as the environmental impact of the mature tree’s removal. Replacements will have to be done at a 1:1 ratio for smaller trees and a 1.5:1, 2:1, or even 3:1 ratio for much larger trees.

The proposed fee structure has been revised a bit from the current ordinance, but I believe people will generally consider it to be fair and reasonable. (The fee schedule will be published annually but unfortunately it was not included in the agenda document linked previously. However, we did spend many hours studying it in committee and discussing it with the City of Newton’s Law Department.)

An ordinary, non-exempt property owner removing one large healthy tree to do some construction should be able to afford the fee cost as part of their project (or can simply plant some new trees elsewhere on the property to avoid the fee), but a for-profit construction firm clear-cutting an entire lot will end up paying a substantial amount of money in total, if they choose not to plant replacements.

On that note of replacement trees: Hedges of trees along a property will no longer qualify as replacement trees, which addresses the habit of many development/construction firms cutting down all the mature trees and then lining up a hedge of little newly planted evergreen trees at the property that often end up dying off within a few years anyway and certainly rarely grow very large. Replacement trees will also have to survive and not be cut down for five years, or if they die or are removed early, then they will be treated for the purposes of permits and fees as being the size of the original tree they had replaced.

Finally, the non-profit Newton Cemetery, which was established in the mid-19th century, had respectfully requested that they be treated differently under the ordinance because of their status as a publicly accessible arboretum. They will have to submit regular updates and tree plans from their staff arborist to the city, but they will have the flexibility to plant replacement trees based on their existing and ongoing botanical plans, rather than on more arbitrary formulas. As a funerary institution, they are nearing full capacity, and they are working to ensure that they have a fully-funded trust that can support the maintenance of their arboretum for generations to come, even after they no longer have new customers purchasing plots.

Historic Preservation

Like most of my family, I have a keen interest in history and I have been passionate about exploring the complexities of Historic Preservation in an ever-evolving community like Newton. On the one hand, historic structures contribute to a distinctive streetscape and a unique sense of place. On the other hand, if the laws are too restrictive on maintenance, modification, and allowed uses, we have seen many communities lose their historic structures to neglect, decay, and collapse. 

In order to preserve our local structural history, we have to balance protections with cost-effectiveness questions and adaptive re-use. For example, if a historic church’s congregation is running low on members and funds, then that building is at risk of maintenance failures or redevelopment pressures – unless they are allowed to attract and retain tenants of various non-religious uses, who can contribute rental income toward preservation budgets. Allowable land use categories, parking restrictions, and more all affect these decisions and the viability of preservation. Similarly, for historic homes, many of the larger homes can be difficult to afford routine maintenance, but if converted internally to allow multiple dwelling units, there would be more income to cover the annual upkeep costs.

Earlier this year, I nominated (with the help of former Councilor John Rice and current at-large Councilors Andreae Downs and Deb Crossley) the “Strong Block” property along Beacon St and Windsor Rd in Waban Square for local landmark status at the Newton Historical Commission. Some of the structures have been on the National Register of historic buildings since the 1980s, but Newton had never added a layer of local protections.

The present Strong Block was developed over a span of more than 60 years, from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, on land owned for much of that time by William C. Strong or his heirs. Strong had been one of the main advocates of extending a railroad through what became Waban, and he had also acquired many large tracts of land in the surrounding area for development. In a sense, his vision built the Waban we know today, even if some of it was not completed until well after his passing. The oldest section of the Strong Block consists of the building including the three storefronts currently numbered 1649, 1645, and 1641 Beacon Street. This building was constructed in 1897 for William C. Strong, but the other buildings post-dated his death in 1913. The distinctive corner building, Number 1625 Beacon Street, opened in 1931. The heirs of William Strong finally sold their interests in the Strong Block in 1951. The final contiguous addition to the Block was Number 1651 Beacon Street, in 1958.

Next Thursday evening, August 24, at 7 PM there will be a final public hearing on the staff recommendation to the Newton Historical Commission for landmarking this large, multi-structure property. The Commission has flexibility in determining differing future levels of review for various, discrete portions of the property. If approved, some parts of the lot (such as the rear parking lot located at a lower elevation) would still be eligible for contextually-appropriate multi-story redevelopment in the future. Even some of the not-so-historical structures there now, such as the Waban Market, could potentially gain additional stories, with a review of Appropriateness by the Newton Historical Commission in the future. 

But the truly historic and architecturally distinctive structures on the block would receive enhanced protections, even if new Village Center Overlay District zoning is approved for Waban Square. These would not be ironclad, unbreakable protections of every single detail – because maintenance is important and businesses need to be able to change out their signs – but overall the sense of place and unique facades would be maintained essentially as they are now. (There would also not be requirements to turn back the clock to some earlier version of the building.) 

The property owners’ legal representation expressed that they were willing to accept the landmarking as long as some of those key points of reasonable flexibility were maintained. Similarly, Newton’s Planning and Development Board offered a non-binding opinion to the Newton Historical Commissioncommenting on both the historic nature of the site and the importance of keeping some ability to enhance and develop the large property for greater economic potential, which will actually help make historic preservation more financially viable in the long-run (and any teardown prospects much less attractive).

“The Planning & Development Board recommends that the Newton Historical Commission landmark the property at 2-12 Windsor Rd. However, the site is proposed to be included in the Village Center Overlay District and the Board advises that the landmark designation acknowledge the opportunity for commercial and residential development on the site. In particular, it was the view of the Board that the entire parking lot and the section of the multi-building property at 10 Windsor did not appear to be contributing to the historic character of the site. The Board would urge that the NHC to review proposals for alterations, additions or new buildings on the site a focus on the key historic qualities of the site that ought to be preserved and with greater flexibility in considering the non-contributing portions of the site noted above.”

I also anticipate a staff memo to the Newton Historical Commission being released online next week with further detailed recommendations on appropriate and practical historic preservation standards for this site.

2022-23 Mid-term Report from Newton City Councilor Bill Humphrey

The following update was mailed out to a few thousand Ward 5 households in July 2023. You can sign up to receive more frequent Ward or political newsletters by email here.

Dear Ward 5 constituent,
With my third year in office complete and my second term three-quarters over, it is time to update you on my work since the 2021 city elections, and what is on the horizon for the remainder of the term.
 
We have recently completed the FY24 budget process. By law, the City Council has almost no official role on the budget, compared to the Mayor, Superintendent of Schools, and the School Committee, who can actually move funds around. However, we do have opinions and some obligation to raise questions and concerns during the consultative process each year, and we did participate this year on the decision to slightly slow the unsustainable annual pace of pension pre-funding.
 
As Newtonians, we must all acknowledge the difficult pressures of rising costs in required major contracts and statutory obligations, weighed against the legal cap on property tax revenue growth. But it is also the responsibility of elected leaders to rise to such challenges by trying to find a way to say yes to offering and maintaining public services wherever possible, rather than looking first for reasons to say no. Disinvestment is fiscal self-sabotage in the long run and not prudent for future revenue strength.
 
As a Ward Councilor, I am one front-line interface between residents and those city services. Whenever possible, I work with city staff from many departments to see how we can help meet your requests.
 
For more than three years so far, I have been taking your calls and answering your emails, from matters as small as yard waste pickup delays or potholes to trying to find ways and means for the city to help you or your family if you are in crisis. Keep it coming! But in the meantime, here is a bigger picture view of what we are and have been working on in the City Council beyond the budget season.
 

Working for you in committee

I continue to serve on the City Council’s Finance Committee and its Programs & Services Committee.
 
On the Programs & Services Committee this term, we are debating issues like reducing plastic waste and strengthening protection of large trees on private property. These are, as you can imagine, extremely complex ordinances with strong opinions across the spectrum, with some people rejecting any city involvement at all and some people insisting there should never be exemptions. But our deliberative process helps get us toward compromise measures that can pass the full Council, be signed by the Mayor, and be successfully implemented by city staff with their limited time and resources.
 

Zoning and housing

The City Council is more than a decade into its discussions of comprehensive zoning redesign, and we now have the added complexity of complying with a new state mandate to zone the right to build thousands more market-rate housing units near some or all of our community’s 11 MBTA stations. 
 
I do not serve on the Zoning & Planning Committee, but I have been closely following the discussions and deliberations. My objective is for us to approve a plan that complies with the state requirements, enhances our commercial vibrancy in the village centers, but also preserves a sense of place in our most distinctive streetscapes (by promoting adaptive reuse of historic buildings) and discourages the replacement of smaller and older single-family homes with merely a much larger but still single-family home. (If something is going to be replaced, the new construction should at least have additional units.)
 
I’m committed to only voting for a map that is in the best interests of Upper Falls, Waban, and Newton Highlands – as well as the city overall. We are getting closer as we continue to debate and negotiate, and I am confident we will get there soon, even if I still have suggested improvements I would like to see in Ward 5. However, this still leaves us with plenty of zoning work in the next term on other commercial and former industrial areas, as well as residential blocks between village centers.
 
Newton continues to have one of the strongest requirements for including guaranteed and permanent affordable housing units within “market-rate” development projects, and some of us are also working toward making it easier to build completely and deeply affordable mid-sized projects for our seniors, families, people with disabilities, and other very low-income individuals.
 
At the end of the last term, Newton’s City Council finally established an Affordable Housing Trust, which will be able to proactively study potential affordable housing development opportunities before they arise and to move quickly on land acquisitions so that affordable housing builders can line up their grants, credits, and bank financing to propose a project to the city. (Often these projects pay for themselves, but the new Trust can move faster to get them into position for that to be possible.)
 
Another big step forward this term was the City Council’s approval of a revised Accessory Dwelling Unit ordinance. These are often colloquially called “in-law apartments.” They will now be allowed “by right” instead of “by special permit” if they are smaller than 900 square feet (or 50% of the primary unit on a property). This will allow more multi-generational families to live together, enable new incomes for owner-occupants of older homes, and facilitate additional units of new housing across Newton with a smaller effect on the neighborhood. (Contact the Inspectional Services Department to learn more.)
 
The Council has also been working steadily on developing and implementing new energy efficiency (and sourcing) requirements for new construction and renovation of homes and large commercial buildings. We all want to get Newton to a point where our buildings are using less and greening the rest.
 

Future plans

In the remaining months of 2023, the Council will continue working on the aforementioned ongoing policy issues, among others, as well as addressing unexpected matters that will no doubt arise. But constituent services work remains a daily task, and I am always happy to help where I can.
 
I am seeking re-election to a third term in November to keep building on our progress. I hope you will let me know if you have feedback. And thank you again for sending me back for a second term in November 2021 with 63% of the vote!

Rethinking How We Invest In Our Future | Village Day Office Hours on Sunday | Pride Month Message

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

It was so nice to see so many Ward 5 residents in person at my booth on Waban Village Day last month, and it was a great opportunity to hear from you and address concerns or issues in our ward's neighborhoods. I'm looking forward to seeing more of you again this Sunday June 11 from 11 AM to 4 PM on Lincoln St at the Newton Highlands Village Day.
 

Pride Month Message

Even in a difficult time nationally for LGBTQ+ rights and recognition, it is vital to recognize the pride and resilience of the community this month, which we did last week with Newton's annual Pride Flag-Raising ceremony at City Hall. Through solidarity, both within and from beyond the LGBTQ+ community, we can find great hope that equality, respect, and acceptance will prevail and that this dark period will recede once more.

Rethinking How We Invest In Our Future

Last week the Newton City Council completed its annual review of the budget and capital improvements plan, and this week we finalized revisions to the pre-funding timetable for our pension obligations, as proposed by the independent Retirement Board.

With the FY24 budget proposals from the Mayor and Superintendant now set to take effect, and with the recent unsuccessful tax override referendum now a few months behind us, I wanted to take a moment to step back and invite everyone to take a look at the bigger picture beyond any single year of budgeting and heated debates around specific line items.

It has been said that there are two kinds of people in political office: those who believe their job is to tell you why you can’t have nice things and those who try to find a way to say yes to delivering more for you. 

One unfortunate trend in world politics in the past decade or so has been the embrace of a notion that the only “adults in the room” are the candidates who promise to make more cuts to government services and to roll back hard-won past policy victories. Promoting an optimistic vision for the future – instead of endorsing a perpetually narrowing horizon – and showing creative thinking on how to meet our needs as a society has become ridiculed as “unserious.”

This line of thinking has become so embedded that it feels as natural as the laws of gravity to believe there is no alternative. Genuine investments in our collective future are soon diverted into untouchable investment funds. Growing our community now, with permanent enhancements that strengthen our future revenues, is abandoned in favor of hoping the whims of market performance will meet future obligations.

But, of course, there is always an alternative pathway on policy, just as it is true that electromagnetic forces are vastly stronger than the inexorable pull of gravity. Budget cutbacks, overly aggressive savings, and a blanket reluctance to borrow are not always examples of fiscal prudence. Government budgets are not the same as household budgets. Reasonable caution can sometimes ebb into full-blown retreat just when some forward momentum is needed.

Even as we must meet all our financial obligations and deliver balanced budgets, there are choices in how and over what timetable we achieve these things. The safest path to a brighter fiscal future – and the one most likely to keep voters engaged in the project of building a better tomorrow together – is for government to make those key investments in ourselves and in materially improving our lives. That is how we rebuild public confidence and public finances, both of which have eroded because of years of under-investment in maintenance and service provision.

Together, we would be laying genuine groundwork for future financial growth and future budget restoration far better than in the ever-shrinking logic of austerity politics and its false promises of firm financial footing. 

Leaders should strive to make life a little better each year. Just as forward progress is not inevitable, it is equally true that sliding a bit backwards every year is a political choice, not a fact of life.

There is nothing unserious about this perspective. To suggest that this is not being “the adult in the room” is a trivial slogan in defense of a political ideology that is increasingly unmoored from reality and good sense, despite positioning itself as immutable truth.

Sometimes I am asked how I make a difference on the City Council as one of 24 members – and one of eight on the Finance Committee – and I always note that I do my homework and my research, yet I often still arrive at, articulate, and champion an alternative economic viewpoint, to which I then work to bring more colleagues around. Just by being part of those debates, I shift the framing of those conversations and our imagination.

We must all acknowledge the difficult pressures of rising costs in required major contracts, legal settlements, and statutory funding obligations, weighed against the firm cap on property taxes, which the voters declined to lift in the recent citywide referendum. But it is also the responsibility of elected leaders to rise to such challenges by trying to find a way to say yes to offering and maintaining public services wherever possible, rather than looking first for reasons to say no.

As a Ward Councilor, I am one front-line interface between residents and those city services, provided by our incredible, tireless city employees, who deserve far more compensation than they currently receive. This work is both the most rewarding part of my job and the one that gives me the greatest insights on a weekly basis into the myriad ways that the public needs the government to serve them. 

Many residents might not realize the full scope of these constituent services needs and the sheer number and volume of interaction points between city government and the daily lives of residents and their families. These range from as small as yard waste pickup issues and problem potholes up to family crises and emergency assistance. Whenever possible, I work with staff from many different departments to see how we can help and say yes to your requests.

For more than three years so far, I have been taking your calls and answering your emails. Keep it coming!

We the people are our own government, and it is therefore the government’s duty, through its public employees and your elected officials to ask what we can do for you.

That’s why I’ll be seeking a third term on the City Council this year. I know the City of Newton can do better for all of us. We should say so, and then we should do it.

April 2023 Newsletter: 2 bike/pedestrian input opportunities, Countryside update, 6 upcoming events of interest, leaf blower reminder

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

Today’s newsletter is a simple roundup of a number of upcoming or ongoing community events and public input opportunities, including a study on future connection opportunities for the Newton Upper Falls Greenway into Needham, a 5-year master plan for bike/pedestrian networks in Newton, and the Countryside Elementary School reconstruction project. But first, a few quick reminders…

I was glad to see so many people at Newton’s Earth Day fair at City Hall this past weekend, even if the rain pushed it inside. Don’t forget to sign up for a NewtonServes volunteer project on May 7. Waban Village Day is just ahead on May 21, but the day before (May 20) will be the first day of the Newton Community Farm Seedling Sale (noon-3) and DPW Day at City Hall. (And if you can’t make it to the Seedling Sale or just want to learn more about the farm, check out their open house on May 6 from 4-6 PM at 303 Nahanton St in Ward 8.) Newton Highlands Village Day will follow in quick succession on June 11.

If you are someone who uses a landscaping service with leaf blowers, the seasonal rules for those will kick in after Memorial Day in just a few weeks. Enforcement of violations by those companies has gone way up, including a large number of fines, but compliance has never been easier. As a property owner, you just need to make sure your contractors are on the approved compliance list, so that you are not held responsible if they violate the rules. The 2023 list is already available at the preceding link from our Department of Inspectional Services.


I'll have more to say in a future newsletter about the latest Village Center and MBTA Communities zoning redesign proposals, but in the meantime you can read the revised proposed category definitions and check out the maps for Version 2.0 in last week's Planning Staff memo to the City Council. (It was discussed in more depth at the April 24, 2023 meeting of the Zoning & Planning Committee.) The latest proposal is still a draft, and many Councilors have further revisions they would like to see, but this version would apparently get us into compliance with state law requiring new residential zoning near transit stations. And it has enough wiggle room that we can still meet our requirements, even if we have to make more changes in the next version in response to public feedback.
 

Another note in passing before we get into the heart of the updates below: I know many residents got a lot of value over my live tweets about City Council meeting agendas and discussions. Unfortunately I did stop posting those back in November, and I’m probably not going to bring them back. The site has gotten much less usable under new management, a lot of longtime users left the platform in response, and I couldn’t justify putting in the effort there anymore. It has made it a bit harder to pull together newsletters as well, since those short tweets often formed the foundation of a longer writeup. On the other hand, I’m sure some people are just as happy to hear that I’ve stopped tweeting!

Newton/Needham Greenway Connection Study: Community Input by April 30

A message from Newton’s Director of Transportation:

Help plan a future path connecting Newton and Needham!

The City of Newton and Town of Needham are working together to study the future use of the former railroad corridor (the Charles River Branch) that historically connected the two communities. We are looking for your input! See this page to learn more, or read on.

Recreating a connection is a long-term interest and effort. The possibility of a shared-use path would extend the Upper Falls Greenway across the Charles River, across I-95/128, and along the former railroad right of way to Webster Street in Needham Heights. This project is still in the preliminary stages and has not yet been planned, designed, or funded.

To assist with planning, the municipalities received state funding to conduct a feasibility study, which will include a technical analysis, a survey, and two community meetings to describe the project and hear from the public.

The municipalities are considering whether this would be a path for cyclists, pedestrians and similar uses, or if it would also provide public transportation with electric shuttle buses.

Follow this link for more information, including details on community meetings on April 18 and April 26, and to participate in a community survey until April 30.

Thanks for your participation!

Public Input Requested by May 8 on Bike/Pedestrian 5-Year Plan

A message from Safe Routes to School and from Newton’s Director of Transportation

Newton is in the process of developing our first Bike/Ped Plan, which will lay out the steps for the next five years. PLEASE thoughtfully fill out the tool and ask all your friends, neighbors and acquaintances to do the same. Kids can, too! Feedback using the online tool is due by May 8. This is a plan for us, Newton residents (and those who bike/walk/roll in Newton), so we need everyone's ideas and concerns to be heard now!

Do you walk, roll or bike in Newton? Would you like to do so more than you do now?  Please add your voice to the Bicycle/Pedestrian Network Plan by Monday, May 8! We need to know where you want to bike, walk, or use an assistive mobility device, and what challenges you face in doing so. This information will help planners prioritize the routes where we need to make walking, rolling and biking more safe, convenient and enjoyable for all who live and work in Newton.

There are three ways to participate by May 8:

1. Use the map tool on the web site (desktop computer recommended): link

2. Complete this survey: link

3. Send an email to bikepedplan@newtonma.gov that answers the questions in the survey.

The City and its consulting partner will use this public input to recommend priorities to improve to our sidewalks, trails and cycling routes, and will share our progress at upcoming public meetings. To learn more about the study, visit newtonma.gov/bikepedplan.

Summary of Latest Decisions on Countryside Elementary School Project

A detailed update from earlier in April from Newton’s Public Buildings Commissioner Josh Morse, for those who are interested in tracking that project after the recent debt exclusion vote:

The Countryside School Project started in April of 2021 with an invitation from the MSBA to the Eligibility Phase of the grant program.  In  December of 2021 he MSBA invited the Project to partner in the development of a Feasibility Study and  the Countryside School Building Committee, CSBC was formed. Over the past 15 months and 50 meetings, we have completed a significant amount of work. We started with a big push to make the school community and neighborhood aware of the project through direct certified mailing, social media, email, and through a variety of Newton Public Schools communication streams.  

We have met monthly with the CSBC, Design Review Committee, DRC, and community monthly since the project began. Our meetings have been well attended, and everyone has an equal seat at the virtual table which has fostered a healthy, productive, and efficient dialog that has allowed us to move swiftly through the feasibility phase.  

We met early and often with the Countryside School staff for both project updates and productive staff visioning sessions where the educators helped shape the future for the Countryside School Project. 

We updated and established our educational program to help us fully understand what the Countryside School Project must deliver, and in January we submitted the Preliminary Design Program to the MSBA.  

We established our design enrollment and space summary based on current and projected Countryside student enrollment and the Massachusetts School Building Authority, MSBA, space guidelines. This helped us determine the size of the building and land area needed to support the Countryside School Project.  

We then started our site search process by establishing the criteria for the evaluation of the various sites. The criteria were not surprisingly very similar to the criteria we’ve used over the past decade on a variety of school projects. We then evaluated close to 150 sites throughout Newton. Out of those sites, there were only a small handful within the Countryside School district, which were all either parks or sites currently used for other municipal purposes, and which were also on the very outer edges of the district and cost prohibitive to redevelop. Therefore, the recommendation was that the current Countryside School site remain the site for the school project.   

While all the work above was being completed, our project team has been hard at work analyzing and evaluating the existing conditions of the current Countryside School site. This included borings, test pits, wetlands and site surveys, and much more. 

With the adjacent wetlands, brook, and existing floodplain, we looked hard at the water table, stormwater, and site to ensure that we were as informed as possible with regards to the siting of the new facility. We received a report from Horsley Witten, an incredible civil engineering firm that specializes in working in and around flood plains. They have proven and explained that the Countryside site is undeniably viable, and that the proposed siting and elevation of the new building will sit above the 500-year flood plain. They also explained that we will at a minimum maintain as much flood storage capacity as exists today, and possibly increase the flood storage capacity in the end. Through the use of porous asphalt, bioswales, rain gardens, and other stormwater mitigation efforts, we will have a very positive impact on the site and the neighborhood. To hear directly from the professionals at Horsley Witten, please click here, and to read their summary report you can click here.   

With the current site identified as the preferred location for the Countryside School Project, and understanding that we had a very viable site, we began to evaluate various conceptual site options.  

Using the same approach used for every large project, we established a criteria matrix to help evaluate various site concepts.  

The existing building sits well below the floodplain, and building code requirements do not allow it to remain there. This means that we either must elevate the entire existing building, renovate, and add to it, or we must build a new facility on another portion of the site. The concept of elevating the existing building has been evaluated, and it is not only technically impractical and cost prohibitive, but also yields a vastly inferior finished product.  

Of the various new construction options, it became clear quickly that the best option was to build on the northeast portion of the site. Not only does this option elevate the building above the 500-year floodplain, but it allows for an optimal building configuration, site layout, and it affords the possibility of keeping the Countryside School students in the current building while the new school is constructed.  

On April 4th, the CSBC and DRC straw voted unanimously to recommend option 6A as the preferred site concept for the Countryside School Project. This vote was a straw vote to ensure that we had an opportunity to present an update to the Public Facilities Committee prior to the formal and official vote of the CSBC on April 25th to submit the Preferred Schematic Report to the MSBA. 

In the coming months we will continue to work with the CSBC, DRC, and Community to study, refine, and advance our site plan with the goal of seeking site plan approval of the City Council in the fall.

We are still on track to start construction in the summer of 2025, and complete construction in the summer of 2027. The exact schedule may change as we continue to work with the MSBA and the various stakeholders.  

Frequently Asked Questions about the Override

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

Since the beginning of February, I’ve been knocking on hundreds of doors all across Newton to give voters the opportunity to ask questions to a member of the City Council’s Finance Committee about the March 14th override referendum. Here are some of the most frequent questions I have gotten – and below I’ve written my answers to them, which might help you make or clarify your decision.

• Why are we voting in March?

• How much will these questions add to my property taxes each year?

• Is this a permanent new tax levy each year?

• Why can’t the city “live within its means”?

• Why do potential budget cuts fall so heavily on schools and roads?

• Can’t we just borrow more money?

• What about One Time Funds? Can’t we wait a few years for an override?

• How much new funding will come from the state via the 2022 Fair Share Amendment tax?

• Why do two of the questions say “renovation/addition or replacement”? Those are very different levels of proposals.

• How did certain schools get picked for the referendum?

• Will my road get fixed now if this referendum passes?

• Are the promised spending priorities permanent?

• This tax increase is really hard on people with limited, fixed-incomes. What do I do?

If you have received a ballot in the mail, don’t forget to turn it in soon, by mail or at a white City Hall secure drop box. It needs to arrive before March 14th. In-person early voting at City Hall ends today at 5 PM. Otherwise you can vote at your usual polling place on Tuesday March 14th, a week from today. (All Ward 5 stations are the same as in 2022, but some other polling stations moved recently.)

Why are we voting in March?

There are three major factors driving the timing of this referendum: One is the state requiring us to seek voter approval before proceeding on our school rebuilding projects if we want their financial assistance. Another is that the Newton Teachers Association contract (the largest  single contract in Newton) is up for negotiation again this spring, and we need to know how much revenue we’re working with for that. Third is that the budget goes in Fiscal Year cycles, and so the Mayor and Superintendent need to know how much funding is available before releasing a budget proposal for the Newton Public Schools and City of Newton, which must be voted on before the end of June.

In 2013, voter turnout was actually higher in the March special override election than in the November mayoral election.

How much will these questions add to my property taxes each year?

The City of Newton website has an Override Calculator where you can put in your address and it will calculate the projected dollar amount per year and per day that will be assessed additionally beyond your current tax obligations. For my house, for example, it’s about $462 if all 3 questions pass. Some very large homes would pay more than that but many smaller homes would pay much less.

Something to bear in mind is that if the override does not pass, it is likely (based on past experience in Newton) that user fees for city and school services will increase or be added to try to address the budget gaps, and these new flat fees are probably going to add up to more than this tax increase would have been for most residents.

Is this a permanent new tax levy each year?

This is a major distinction between “one time funds” the city has available this year and what is being proposed in the referendum. Question 1, the operating override, is proposing to create a permanent additional revenue stream of about $10 million, which will help the city make long-term planning decisions about programs and salaries without worrying about those funding sources expiring imminently.

The two schools projects with their own ballot questions will be bonded over 30 years. Technically that means they aren’t permanent, but of course 30 years is a pretty long time.

Why can’t the city “live within its means”?

Every municipality in Massachusetts is required to balance its budget each year. This means that it does have to live within its means, but we can either make deep cuts to ensure that, or we can increase the means we have available. 

Some cities and towns have had huge booms in revenue growth by allowing very rapid redevelopment of older industrial and commercial sites. Other cities and towns routinely put override questions on the ballot every year or so. These are ways of increasing the means within which their budgets exist, but this has not been what Newton has done. We have had only four proposed overrides before this one, and two of them have failed, resulting in very significant cuts to the budget.

Without an override, Newton's total revenues – both from residential/commercial property taxes and from other sources (new growth, hotels and meals taxes, etc) – only grow by about 3.5% to 3.7% per year. Even if property values increase by a big percentage each year, the state cap means that the total revenues collected from those properties across the whole city can only increase by 2.5% per year … unless voters approve an override of the cap to set a new baseline.

There are a lot of costs that the City of Newton and Newton Public Schools are essentially locked into paying, no matter how prudently and carefully we stretch every dollar. 

For example, Newton must provide school bus services, and we have very little control over the bidding process. Almost every year, only one company bids to provide this service. That is unfortunately common across the region. Our school bus contracts go up by about 9% per year, despite Newton’s 3.5% revenue growth per year. That means cuts somewhere else.

Another example is our pension funding requirements. There is only a little wiggle room each year on how much more money to put into our pension fund to meet state requirements for a fully funded pension system, and the City of Newton does not even fully control what amount will be required to put in that year. That means cuts somewhere else.

Materials costs have also been rising for our construction and roads projects, and so have cost-of-living requirements for competitive contracts. Newton is increasingly struggling to keep up with contract offerings in neighboring communities that are experiencing super development booms or which have more frequent tax overrides pass.

Why do potential budget cuts fall so heavily on schools and roads?

The schools are our biggest department by budget and the Department of Public Works is also one of the biggest. Many city departments are only a handful of staff and very small budgets that could not really be cut without being eliminated completely. When materials costs and salary costs rise by more than 3.5% and there’s no override, the cuts become almost inevitable in some of the biggest departments. In 1998 and 2008, failed overrides resulted in significant reductions in ongoing annual investments in our schools and roads, and these cuts were largely never reversed. Deferred maintenance usually leads to more expensive emergency costs later down the line anyway, putting us even deeper in the hole.

Everyone, including me, can name something in the annual budget they don’t agree with as a spending priority, but I can tell you that I’ve never heard any consensus across the city on which spending items they can live without or would prefer to see eliminated. Everyone has different priorities and nobody agrees on their ranking of importance.

Can’t we just borrow more money?

Newton has a AAA credit rating, the highest available, which lowers the cost of borrowing (although interest rates are rising for everyone, making it more expensive), and we do borrow money to bond construction projects and equipment. But the money still needs to be borrowed against either future revenues or future savings. It has to be repaid and we also don’t want our payments on our debt to become so large on an annual basis that they also begin to outstrip our annual revenue growth. We want to borrow money for things that will strengthen the city’s attractiveness, finances, and revenue growth in the future. We don’t want to borrow money to cover structural deficit holes in the budget.

What about One Time Funds? Can’t we wait a few years for an override?

You can read a very detailed and readable explanation of one-time funds here, but below is what I talk about with voters on the doorstep.

The operating override proposes a permanent new revenue stream, which we can use to make long-term decisions on salaries, programs, and services. Newton’s Fiscal Management Guidelines (sensibly) strongly discourage using one-time funds to pay for ongoing operating expenses (and also discourage putting them toward pension funding obligations) because we can’t count on those funds to be there for us in the future.

Newton did receive a significant amount of Federal emergency relief money during the pandemic, but it has mostly been allocated already (especially to catch up somewhat on deferred roads maintenance and on one-time projects or short-term pilot programs), and it must be under contract by the end of calendar year 2024. We cannot make multi-year plans on contracts and services based on the Federal money which is almost gone and is time-limited.

Newton also has an unusually high balance of unallocated “Free Cash” this particular year, but this is an exceptional circumstance that also will not be repeated in future years. We received about $8 million in a one-time tax settlement from the Eversource utility company, which they had been fighting for years, and which would have normally been small amounts of revenue over time in earlier years going toward specific relevant budget items. There was also an early payment of a Payment-in-lieu-of-tax (PILOT) contribution from a non-profit that was more than $2 million. Again, these are very specific circumstances that will not recur every year.

The operating override, by contrast, is a permanent new source of revenue available to us every year, which means we can make long-term spending choices now. Without that, we will have to assume that we can’t count on the money being there in the future. (And likewise you can bet on the credit ratings agencies arriving at the same conclusion, since their ratings partially depend on the assumption that voters will make available more revenues when necessary.)

How much new funding will come from the state via the 2022 Fair Share Amendment tax?

Newton recently received its funding allocations from the state government for the year, and there are no proposed increases in state aid to Newton beyond the normal annual increase, which actually represents a net cut because costs have increased even faster than the state aid increase. Fair Share (Millionaire’s Income Tax) funding seems to be going toward state-level transit and higher education projects as well as low-income cities and towns, which is good, but it doesn’t do anything for Newton’s annual budget crunch concerns.

Why do two of the questions say “renovation/addition or replacement”? Those are very different levels of proposals.

The state requires that the ballot questions be worded very broadly. In fact, our Public Buildings Commissioner has been very clear that both schools will be completely rebuilt and we are well into the planning stages and public input process for both projects. We can’t do this without help from the Mass School Buildings Authority and your approval on the ballot.

How did certain schools get picked for the referendum?

Many schools are in poor condition and not equal to the quality of the new schools approved by voters in 2013, but two of the schools in the worst condition are Countryside and Franklin, and they are most in need of urgent replacement. Countryside, in particular, needs to be moved to higher ground to stop regular flooding of the building, and it needs additional space capacity in the classrooms and offices for modern educational expectations. (One of the major development projects nearby will also be contributing funding toward this project.)

If these two questions do not pass – and you can vote separately on each of the three questions if you want – then these projects will not happen and your nearby school of concern will also get pushed back on its timetable for eventual renovation or reconstruction.

There is also money for bonding Horace Mann renovations in the first ballot question, the operating override. And when that project is completed, that annual money for bonding will be re-applied to other school renovation projects as needed.

Will my road get fixed now if this referendum passes?

It might. But if it doesn’t pass, then it’s definitely much less likely. The road maintenance budget is going to fall a lot further behind without an additional infusion of permanent revenue.

If you’re worried about declining roads (or perhaps slipping school quality for that matter), these things depend on having more revenue, not less. It only gets worse with less revenue available. There’s not a lot left to cut from other places, and we’re falling behind our neighboring communities.

Are the promised spending priorities permanent?

For the first budget after this referendum, these will be guaranteed expenditures as stated. Legally we can’t make any new revenue be bound to a specific line item forever because we are required to have the flexibility in the future to balance our budget by any means necessary if overall revenues were to take a sudden hit, and we also can’t be bound to fund something forever that might not always exist.

However, in practical terms, Newton is in such a tight fiscal position that we will realistically only be able to bolster the budget items mentioned in the referendum with this new revenue, and we won’t really have much maneuverability to do anything else with it other than what the referendum is promising.

This tax increase is really hard on people with limited, fixed-incomes. What do I do?

I completely understand that property taxes are regressive and hard to keep up with on a limited, fixed-income because your appreciating asset does not become new money for you until you sell it. That’s why we have increased eligibility for tax relief programs for seniors, certain people with disabilities, and veterans as well as increasing the amount of relief. You can call City Hall at any time to find out if you might qualify and how it works.

But the unfortunate reality of the situation is that Massachusetts municipalities like Newton are stuck between a rock and a hard place. This is the mechanism by which we fund our local budgets and we don’t have much flexibility from the state on how that works. When our costs for existing services rise much faster than our annual revenues, especially for critical and legally mandated services, we are not given much choice other than to ask residents to chip in a bit more for additional revenue.

Questions about the override referendums? Join a Ward 5 discussion this Saturday Jan 7

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

Please join us for an info session and discussion with

Vote Yes for Newton

Learn all about the March Override!

Saturday, January 7th

11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Zoom details on RSVP (RSVP to andreae4newton at gmail dot com)

Hosted by Ward 5 Councilors Andreae Downs, Deb Crossley, Bill Humphrey & former Ward 5 Councilor John Rice. All are welcome! Please forward this invitation to other interested residents.

 

Can't make it to the event on Saturday?

If you can't make it, don't miss my comprehensive writeup in my December 3, 2022 newsletter explaining what is in the three referendum questions and why we're putting them on the ballot. You can also check out www.voteyesfornewton.org for more information.

Newsletter: Tree lighting, winter parking, override, municipal reproductive rights, village center zoning, and more

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

This newsletter covers the following topics: Waban Tree Lighting, winter overnight parking ban, an update on the Zervas area cell coverage situation, the proposed tax override, regulating “Crisis pregnancy centers” at the municipal level, and village center zoning redesign.

Waban Tree Lighting

Tomorrow (Sunday December 3) at the Waban Library Center at 4:45 PM please join the Waban Improvement Society for a family sing-along and holiday tree lighting, our annual tradition.

Winter overnight parking ban returns as usual

A reminder to residents: Just like last winter, the citywide Overnight Parking Ban is again in effect this winter, as of this past Thursday, Dec. 1. It will continue through Friday, March 31, 2022. Parking on city streets is prohibited from 2 AM to 6 AM, and you will be ticketed if you leave your car out overnight. Resident parking stickers for overnight parking in municipal lots can be obtained (first-come-first-serve) from the city (learn more), but the lots (like the streets) can’t be occupied during snow emergencies.

I recognize the inconvenience and hardship that this system creates for many residents. We are continuing to have a longstanding public debate on the policy. (I wrote about it in a newsletter last November.) It is a polarizing issue. Unfortunately I don’t have any major updates on this apparent impasse. Neither the Mayor nor the City Council have proposed for consideration a significant revision (let alone an end to the ban). I do not sit on the committee that would take it up.

Update on Zervas area cell coverage situation

Nearly two years ago, in January 2021, the City Council approved installation of a cell service booster on a utility pole across from Zervas Elementary School in Waban, in an effort to improve the notoriously horrible cell service at the school and the surrounding streets. Unfortunately, this installation never actually happened, apparently due to some kind of disagreement among utility companies themselves. I only recently became aware of this, and my understanding is that the Department of Public Works is trying to figure out an alternative solution to the problem. For now the cell coverage in the area remains unreliable to non-existent, which is inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst. I am as frustrated as anyone about the situation, and I will keep pressing for a fix here.

Proposed Tax Override: What and Why

In Massachusetts, under a 1980 law, municipalities may only increase their property tax levy by 2.5% per year without seeking an “override” referendum to increase the levy by permission of the residents. We do get some additional revenue from other sources like hotels and meals taxes, but without an override the annual increase in Newton’s revenues is usually around 3.5%. There are no provisions in the statewide cap for changes in economic conditions.

Although Newton has benefited from one-time emergency funds from the federal government during the pandemic and put that money toward one-off capital investments, the shortage of ongoing operating funding amid inflationary pressures came to a head during the spring 2022 debates on the FY23 budget, where the City Council gave a negative recommendation to the proposed budget because of the harsh cuts to certain vital services, especially in the Newton Public Schools. 

That crisis is on course toward a boiling point next year when the Newton Teachers Association will be returning to the negotiating table for their next 3-year contract – one of our biggest single contracts in the city – and the cost-of-living needs of our teachers will undeniably outstrip the typical 3.5% increase in annual city revenues. This situation is also repeated across many other departments. Everyone is facing cost rises right now beyond our municipal control. 

At some point, scrimping and saving here and there in every department’s budget still can’t come up with enough resources to plug all the gaps. As a result, the Mayor and City Council have decided to place a property tax override referendum on the ballot on March 14, 2023, for the first time in 10 years. Only one City Councilor (Lenny Gentile of Ward 4) opposed putting the proposal forward.

As one Newton City Councilor recently observed, the only way you could vote against an operating revenue override at this point would be if you hadn’t looked at the fiscal picture and seen the very dire math on our projected revenues vs our anticipated costs. And the more we pull back on investments in maintaining programs, services, and facilities in order to balance the budget without an override, the more likely we are to trigger a long-term downward spiral in revenues by making Newton less attractive to live, compared to nearby peer communities…

Most residents will only pay a very small amount of additional money in property taxes each year if this referendum passes, and you can check your property for an estimated increase at the online override calculator on the City of Newton website. However, we understand that even a small tax increase can be a hardship for some of our residents with tighter incomes, and so the Mayor proposed and the Council voted to adopt a number of property tax reductions and relief for certain eligible populations. These relief measures, some of which take effect immediately and some of which will require legislative approval from the state to exceed normal relief allowances, include reductions for eligible veterans (and spouses), people with disabilities, and senior citizens, and we also passed home rule petitions or ordinance changes to expand the existing senior tax deferral program and the senior tax work-off volunteer program.

So, what are the actual ballot questions being posed to the voters this coming March?

Two of the ballot questions are simple debt exclusion requests for replacing Countryside and Franklin Elementary Schools. These ballot questions are required by the state as a condition of participating in the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) process to receive assistance (including money) for designing public school renovations and reconstructions.

The most significant ballot question is for the ongoing operating revenue increase proposed. The text summarizing the request and its earmarked uses is as follows:

Shall the City of Newton be allowed to assess an additional $9,175,000 in real estate and personal property taxes for the purposes of funding Public Schools for student needs, street and sidewalk paving and safety improvements, tree planting and maintenance, park and recreational facility improvements and maintenance, improvements to Horace Mann Elementary School, sustainability and climate resiliency actions, and Senior Services programming and operations for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2023?

For the most part, this additional annual levy will not create new programs or expand existing programs, but rather it will simply allow Newton to maintain current levels of services without having to make drastic cutbacks.

Many of our peer communities propose (and pass) a tax override every year or so. We in Newton have been able to avoid seeking a tax override for a decade because of the influx of temporary federal funds and because of the unusual levels of new construction, especially small homes being replaced by much larger homes with vastly greater tax assessments, but we have now arrived at the end of the line in terms of what we can offer without cutting back to the bone. You can learn more at the Yes for Newton campaign website or the official City of Newton override informational page on what the new levy would pay for and why it is being proposed. The Mayor is holding many public engagement sessions to make the case for the fiscal situation and the benefits of passing the referendum, as well as to answer questions from residents about how this might affect them.

Regulating “Crisis Pregnancy Centers”

With the fall of Roe v. Wade nationally, interstate travel for abortion healthcare services is increasing. Massachusetts is one potential destination. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed some new protections recently, but there are still gaps, and it is unclear how quickly these will be addressed in the next legislative term with the new governor. I hope quickly! But in the meantime, Massachusetts municipalities are taking independent action to add some extra measures. I took the lead in October by filing a docket item that would impose ongoing fines for deceptive advertising and false public health statements by so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that pose as healthcare facilities to try to lure in unsuspecting people (including from across municipal and state lines) for the purposes of discouraging the use of abortion services. Last week I traveled throughout Ohio and saw billboards and advertisements everywhere for these facilities, but it is important to understand that these are also widespread in Massachusetts, including in adjacent cities and towns. Our draft to start to deal with this problem is based on the recently adopted ordinance in Somerville and we are requesting the Health and Human Services Department to take enforcement actions.

This is item #528-22 “Request for discussion and ordinance to prohibit deceptive advertising by limited-service pregnancy centers.” The sponsors are Councilors Humphrey, Noel, Bowman, Ryan, Norton, Leary, Lucas, Malakie, Wright, and Danberg. (Everyone on the Council was invited to sign on when we filed it.) We are requesting “to prohibit limited-service pregnancy centers from making deceptive advertisements concerning pregnancy-related services or the provision of pregnancy-related services, including implementing a penalty for violation of the ordinance.” 

The first discussion will take place at the December 7th Programs & Services Committee next week. We might also consider other steps in separate docket items, such as requiring special permits to open such a facility. (This would mean a City Council majority voting on whether or not such a special permit would be detrimental to public health in Newton.) Other municipalities have been considering ordinances on other angles such as a process of reporting consumer protection and safety violations to the Office of the Attorney General and prohibiting the use of municipal resources, staff, and law enforcement in other states’ enforcement actions or investigations against their own residents for seeking abortions in Massachusetts.

If you support Newton taking strong action to regulate and deter so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” locally, please let the City Council and Mayor Fuller know by email as soon as possible.

Your Feedback Needed: Village Centers Zoning Redesign

For several years now, Newton has been working on a significant redesign of our very outdated zoning code. This work has mainly been occurring in the City Council’s Zoning & Planning Committee with help from Planning Department staff. At every stage we have returned to the public to seek feedback and input on what we should be trying to adopt in our redesign and what would work best for our community and specific neighborhoods.

We are currently focused most intensively on our “village centers.” Many of them have empty storefronts as customer revenues consistently fall short of the costs of remaining in business and especially the costs of market rents for these commercial spaces. The village centers vary from one area of the city to the next, but in general I believe they could be more pedestrian-friendly and it would be nice if they had more foot-traffic customers living right there to boost viability of these businesses in our community. So, the question is whether those are our shared goals, and, if so, how we should achieve those goals in terms of policy changes to zoning and permitting?

Recently we finally got to see a first draft of proposed maps for these various village centers across Newton. These were made available to Councilors at the same time as they were made available to the public, and they are already generating a range of reactions, including at our ongoing public feedback sessions on Zoom. 

The Planning Department staff has been very open to feedback and constructive suggestions for improvements to the maps. (As the Ward Councilor for Ward 5, I already made extensive suggestions for changes to the Waban map in the next round, because I did not agree on the appropriateness of a number of proposed zones, and I am confident these will be revised.) For certain areas of the city, people seem to agree they got it right, and certain spots in specific village centers either should or should not have been included in the proposed village center overlay zones, and then there are debates over what each village center overlay zone should or should not include as buildable by-right or by special permit (if at all). 

For example, should the lowest-intensity (and shortest-height) village center zone include a retail option by special permit, or should it just be apartments? What about multi-unit conversion options for historic preservation of large pre-war homes in some places instead of apartment buildings? At this point in the process, almost anything is on the table, and we’re looking for creative solutions from you, the public.

We’re all expecting that the second round of maps in February will look quite a bit different, but it is nice to have a starting point (finally!) to be able to pin down these debates in concrete terms.

You can check out the draft maps (and watch first-round info sessions you might have missed) at this web page. Then we’d like to hear from you, so that we can make the appropriate overhauls for the next drafts. There will also be an official, very expansive Public Comment period next year when we have progressed through various draft phases and feel ready to present something more definitive. But the best time to make your voice heard is right now, so that we can try to include those improvements well before then.

And just remember, if you see something in the maps or code proposal that really concerns you, please let us know, but don’t assume that problem will end up in the final version, because this is just the first draft, and we need this to be a collaborative process in order to make it as successful as possible.

Newsletter: 5 days to visit the Library exhibit on Village Center Zoning! | Yes on 1 & 4

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

This week’s newsletter includes a reminder about the upcoming Child Tax Credit deadline and an explanation of two of the statewide ballot question positions I am supporting, and covers Village Center Zoning information at the library.

Our 2nd annual Indigenous Peoples Day celebration at Newton's Albemarle Field this past weekend was a huge success – even bigger and better than last year!

At the start of the month, I also held office hours at the Upper Falls Village Day. I barely had even a few minutes the entire 3-hour span of my office hours where I wasn't in a conversation with a resident about some issue, concern, or idea! It was great to see everyone who came out.

Maybe I’ll see you at the Harvest Fair in Newton Centre this Sunday. (No booth though.)

Don’t forget to email the City Council about Accessory Dwelling Unit Reform before Monday Oct 17th. I support the changes and wrote about it in my last newsletter.

Child Tax Credit Reminder – Spread the Word (Nov 15 deadline)

A note from CAN-DO and Josephine McNeil for anyone who might benefit from this information before the mid-November deadline: “There’s still time to get your Child Tax Credit and other federal money! Apply even if you have no income or low income and have not filed a 2021 tax return. What could I get? Up to $3,600 per child with the 2021 Child Tax Credit. Any missed COVID Stimulus Payments for you and your children/dependents – up to $1,400 per person. Am I eligible? You can get this money for children you are related to and caring for, even if you have never filed taxes or have not filed in the last few years, and even if you had little or no earned income. This is money for 2021, and more people are eligible to get it than in other years. How do I get this money? Generally, if you are single with an income below $12,500 or filing jointly as a married couple with an income below $25,000, you can file now at: GetCTC.org/can-do If you make above these amounts or may be eligible for additional money through full filing, you will be redirected to GetYourRefund.org. If you already filed a tax return and didn’t get your money, you can get help with other steps. Does this money count as income for benefits I get? This money does not count as income for most benefits, like SNAP, WIC, TANF, Medicaid, CHIP, SSI and most types of public and subsidized housing. You can get the tax payments and still get these benefits. What if I am an immigrant? Even if you do NOT have a Social Security Number, you can get payments for your children who have Social Security Numbers. Under current law, receiving the Child Tax Credit or other tax credits will not affect your immigration status, ability to get a Green Card, or future immigraiton plans. Had a baby in 2020 or 2021? You should sign up! Did you get monthly money from the IRS in 2021 for your kids ($250 or $300 per month per child)? That was just the first part of your money. You have to sign up again in 2022 to get the rest of your money. (GetCTC.org is a non-profit service built by Code for America. Learn more and get FREE help there.)”

(The sites are also available in Spanish. And you can also email Josephine at info@newtoncan-do.org for help as well.)

Yes on 1 for the Fair Share Amendment and Yes on 4 for Safer Roads

• Question 1, the Fair Share Amendment, would create a 4% tax on the portion of a person’s annual income above $1 million and require – in the state constitution – that the funds be spent only on transportation and public education. With Question 1, the top 1% of Massachusetts residents — those making over $1 million a year — would pay their fair share in taxes. 99% of us won’t pay a penny more. And because Question 1 will be written directly into the state constitution, the money would be constitutionally required to go only to transportation and public education. That means $2 billion a year, every year, for better roads, safer bridges, reliable public transportation, and public schools from pre-K through college. 

  • How does this affect residential real estate transactions? The short answer is that almost no one who sells a house will be affected in any way. Last year, less than 1% of home sales in the state generated enough of a gain to be affected by Question 1. Just 895 homes out of 100,000 sold, to be exact. That's because it's the gain in value since the house was originally purchased, not the full sales price, that is subject to income tax. Plus, home sellers can take advantage of multiple tax deductions to reduce their income tax burden: Someone selling a home can deduct up to $500,000 from their taxes on the sale of their primary residence. They can also deduct the entire cost of a renovated kitchen, an updated heating system, a new roof, or any other major improvements they made to the home. With those deductions, in order for a home seller to actually have $1 million in taxable personal income from the sale of a home, they would need to sell the home for at least $1.5 million over the price they originally bought it for. Only people selling the very priciest homes in Massachusetts would see their incomes rise enough to pay a single penny more with the Fair Share Amendment.

  • (The informational paragraphs above are from the campaign website, not my own text.)

• It is also vitally important for Massachusetts voters to vote Yes on 4 for Safer Roads this fall to uphold the legislature's pending law to allow undocumented immigrants to follow the regular process to obtain a driver's license, so that our road safety can be strengthened. (Insurance requires a valid license.) Unfortunately the voter information guides via the mail from the Secretary of State's office were printed before the signatures from the opposition were certified, and so many voters will not have access to the official arguments for and against Question 4 (driver's licenses). 17 states (including neighboring NY, CT, VT, and RI) have legalized driver's licenses for undocumented residents because of the safer road benefits. Massachusetts would be wise to keep up by voting yes on 4 in November. The state Republican Party is the primary opposition group.

5 days left to visit the Newton Free Library exhibit from the City of Newton on village center zoning!

Zoning affects what can be built and where, which impacts sustainability, businesses, housing, and more. It regulates how land in Newton can be developed and what kinds of new buildings are allowed. For example, zoning can influence store and business activity through parking and density requirements, whether green space or public spaces are required in new developments, or the amount of housing supply near public transportation. The City is proposing updates to our zoning code to ensure active and vibrant village centers for decades to come. 

To help understand the concepts being discussed and the rationale, you can visit an exhibit on the 2nd floor of the Library (Room C) through October 17th. It covers zoning history, each proposed zoning change, mapping zones in Newton, and the related but separate new MBTA Communities zoning law, and how zoning changes are made in the city. It also has an engagement table for community members to sit at, discuss the exhibit, and submit their input through the feedback tool on their cell phone, personal laptop, or a library computer.

The exhibit is open at the same time as Newton Free Library’s hours overall. If you’d like a guided tour to understand it even better, there are several available opportunities remaining:

• Thursday, 10/13: 12 - 4pm, 5 - 7pm

• Monday, 10/17: 10am - 6:30pm

Can’t make it to the library in time? Watch this 10 minute NewTV video to learn more and give your input here until October 17th. Learn more at https://newtonma.gov/zoningredesign/vc. 

What is the City asking for input on? A set of proposed changes for the village center zoning, building upon the engagement takeaways from last summer. The Newton City Council’s Zoning and Planning Committee (ZAP) has given City staff the green light to further refine and get community feedback. This includes the types of zoning districts for village centers, allowed heights and parking requirements.

How do community members give input? You can offer input through the online feedback tool: https://tinyurl.com/ZoningFeedbackTool. (Click here for a PDF of the feedback tool, formatted for printing. Please note that this has lower visual quality than the online tool.) There are also two remaining Zoom focus groups for specific subsets of Newton residents: disability community (10/13),and high schoolers + young adults (10/17).

All of this feedback will be helpful to Planning Department staff ahead of the upcoming release of maps defining the proposed boundaries of the village center districts under the new zoning. Having a more clearly defined geography for these zones will likely result in better outcomes than our current “vibes-based” approach to what gets built on lots in or near central hotspots of economic and social activity.

Summer 2022 Report: Chestnut St updates, tree protection, senior center, ADU reform, Cuba trip

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

Summer has drawn to a close, and Autumn is evidently already in full swing. Today’s newsletter includes a recap of some key things that happened this summer, requests for public input on ongoing policy debates this fall, and reminders about upcoming events and changes in Ward 5 and beyond.

This week’s newsletter specifically covers Chestnut St from Beacon St to Comm Ave, Chestnut St @ Amherst Rd, MBTA D Line work, Upper Falls Village Day (office hours!) and Indigenous Peoples Day reminders, the approval of the new Senior Center, the proposed cannabis retailer in Upper Falls, Accessory Dwelling Unit reform, potential tree ordinance reforms, and my recent trip to Cuba. I’ll have to defer some other local policy debates to a future newsletter.

If you are marking the Jewish high holidays this weekend or next week, I wish you a happy new year and an easy fast.

A few recent Summer events

Don't miss your opportunity to sign up for bivalent Covid-19 boosters at Newton City Hall (via the Holtzman Medical Group) to better protect yourself against the prevailing strain of the pandemic virus. I just got mine this past week! It was very convenient (if not entirely painless).

As I mentioned in a newsletter in June, Starbucks workers at the Waban location recently unionized, and in July, other Starbucks workers from the area invited me and Newton City Councilors Alicia Bowman, Holly Ryan, and Maria Greenberg to spend the afternoon in solidarity criss-crossing Newton with them, as they talked to their fellow workers at various locations about organizing themselves into the growing union.

Last weekend, it was a delight to attend the Newton Conservators' 2nd Annual family-oriented "Monarch Festival" at Wellington Park in West Newton, which was positively buzzing with attendance. I learned a lot about how to attract and support monarch butterflies locally here in eastern Massachusetts! 

I stopped by the first-ever Upper Falls Oktoberfest at Dunn-Gaherins, and I also dropped by the Newton Community Pride concert at the Upper Falls Depot, where I heard feedback from various constituents about pending issues.

Chestnut St from Beacon St to Comm Ave

Preparatory utility work for repaving and extensive sidewalk upgrades has been continuing this summer on the section of Chestnut St between Beacon St and Commonwealth Ave. This is not only a complicated street for road traffic – a major north-south artery and chokepoint with a 20 MPH zone, winding back and forth between glacial ledges along a “scenic” residential route – but it has also been a major problem for pedestrians for years. (And most cyclists avoid it completely.) 

A few years ago, at the requests of residents, live speed detection signage was installed, but accident risk remained high and as of this spring, the City of Newton considered this section of Chestnut St to be the highest-ranked area of the entire city for traffic calming needs.

The minimum goal set in the most recent community meeting at the end of June was to get modern, accessible sidewalks along almost the entire stretch on both sides, except for a short section where it was deemed too difficult and expensive to deal with in a regular repaving project, and to add a number of crosswalks. Lanes would also be narrowed slightly to further encourage drivers to slow down instinctively. The hope has been to try to complete that work this year. There were other improvements that the city staff wanted to do in an ideal world, based in part on resident input, that could not be done through the repaving project and its narrower budget.

However, in the September round of federal ARPA funding allocations, the Mayor set aside $2 million for traffic calming in the five most urgent locations in Newton, with this section of Chestnut St being scheduled for work first. We should know more soon about what that would entail specifically, and what the timeline would be. But it is certainly welcome news for those who live nearby, as well as anyone who has to drive through that section from somewhere else and wants to be safer while doing so.

Chestnut St @ Amherst Rd

The Chestnut St section described above is not the only place where residents have made their voices heard. For many years, Waban residents near the intersection of Chestnut St and Amherst Rd (and Tamworth Rd) have been asking the City of Newton to improve pedestrian safety and road safety in general at that section. Although the City did add some features there during recent repaving, many residents still felt that it was insufficient and asked what more could be done. Amherst Rd resident Jonathan Goldenberg recently organized a petition from more than 80 residents in the immediate area asking that this be made a high priority for funding, since City staff agreed about the safety concerns. The specific request was for a Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacon (RRFB) at the crosswalk to help children cross more safely, which is something that we have gradually been installing around Newton more and more as money became available.

I’m pleased to report that Isaac Prizant, Newton’s City Transportation Engineer, was able to make a specific commitment this month on that intersection, based on the Mayor’s latest round of federal ARPA funding allocations: “Newton DPW has been evaluating and prioritizing potential locations for Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons (RRFB) city-wide and the existing crossing at the Chestnut/Amherst/Tamworth intersection ranks high in our ongoing evaluation. [...] we have agreed that this location would be a good fit for a RRFB and it was a matter of identifying funding to move ahead. Last week, Mayor Fuller announced ARPA investment into city-wide traffic calming. While DPW will be working with the City’s Complete Streets Working Group to finalize the new RRFB locations, we are confident that an RRFB will be installed at the Chestnut/Amherst/Tamworth intersection as part of this work.”

Great work by the many advocates over the years who have organized their neighbors to try to make this intersection safer! With fixed and limited resources in the municipal budget each year, it can be a challenge to pick and choose what to set aside and where to spend money. City staff do maintain records of problem intersections and crossings and use various criteria to evaluate as objectively as possible where to prioritize funding for safety improvements, but this kind of neighborhood advocacy can help draw attention to specific spots and keep up the public demand for increasing the allocation of funding to these safety measures broadly.

MBTA D Line reminders

Once again, the D Line is temporarily shut down with shuttle replacement service beginning yesterday (September 24), in three bursts, wrapping up on October 30. During these three nine-day closures, the MBTA will install GLTPS Train Protection kits along the branch, replace more than 6,000 feet of track, and upgrade 6 station crossings at Waban, Eliot, and Woodland Stations, all in Ward 5. This work is a precursor to upgrading many D Line stations for improved accessibility and for much longer Green Line train sets that will finally carry many more passengers, which is greatly needed.

Free, accessible shuttles will replace Green Line service between Riverside and Kenmore (except Beaconsfield station) for the three nine-day periods, which are as follows:

Saturday, September 24 – Sunday, October 2

Saturday, October 8 – Sunday, October 16

Saturday, October 22 – Sunday, October 30

Upper Falls Village Day reminder

The annual Upper Falls Village Day will be happening at the end of Chestnut St (next to Pettee Square and the Greenway) next Sunday, October 2, from 11-2. As usual, I will be there with my pushcart booth, holding office hours for anyone who wants to chat with me.

Indigenous Peoples Day reminder

On Monday, October 10, Newton will hold its 2nd annual Indigenous Peoples Day festival from 11-5 at Albemarle Field: “Join us for this annual event to celebrate and honor Indigenous people. This fun, family-friendly outdoor event will feature dozens of Indigenous artists and over 20 Indigenous vendors!” It was a huge success last year, and I hope even more Newton residents will attend this year. Learn more at https://www.ipdnewton.org/

New Senior Center approved

A brand-new Newton Senior Center should be opening on Walnut St in Newtonville between the summer and fall of 2024, two years from now! (In the meantime, Senior Center activities and services will temporarily be housed at the Brigham House and Hyde Community Center in Newton Highlands village center.) The new building will be a keystone addition to the Newtonville village center and a major facelift compared to the existing Senior Center building, which is no longer in very good shape and which would have been difficult to renovate any further. The design will be very contextually appropriate for both Newtonville and Newton’s public buildings as a whole.

The new Senior Center represents a $20 million investment in our growing senior population, their services, and a broad-range of offerings and spaces for them. There has been more public input solicited and received on this project than on any other public building project in Newton’s history – yes, even more than some of our hot-button school construction projects of the past. This is also an investment in all of us because it will bring Newton into line with peer communities on senior services and keep Newton an attractive place to live.

The City of Newton also reached an agreement with an abutting resident to acquire her property when she eventually is no longer living there, which should allow for the opening up of community open space behind the new facility.

I’ve long been an enthusiastic supporter of a new senior center for Newton, and I’m excited that the City Council was able to give the final approval in early August this year. Unfortunately, I actually was unable to attend the votes in the Finance Committee or full Council, due to the meetings being added to the schedule late to accommodate the votes, and I was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Rocky Mountains respectively, without cell service, when each meeting occurred. But, fortunately, the outcome was not in doubt after years of debate and deliberation!

Newton is also moving ahead steadily on several major school renovation and reconstruction projects as well at the moment, but I’ll have to leave those for another newsletter.

Cannabis location in Upper Falls

The City Council appears to be close to approving a proposal for a small retail cannabis shop on Chestnut St in Newton Upper Falls in a building that used to be a pet groomer business. The petitioners reached a resolution with a neighboring daycare to strengthen their planned barriers between the two parking lots, and they have made a number of other changes in response to neighborhood feedback. The Land Use Committee recently unanimously voted to recommend the proposal, but it was returned to the committee for further work earlier this week when a few documents were not finalized in time for the full Council to hold a vote. I would still anticipate a Council approval fairly soon, and we really have not heard much public objection to the plan.

Recent cannabis proposals have been passed unanimously in the City Council, now that demand seems to have declined to a more manageable level and several sites in Newton no longer have any traffic effects at all. In fact, one approved proposal for Four Corners now appears to be canceled by the petitioners after all, presumably for projected lack of demand, and they seem to be selling the property (unfortunately after closing the longtime Chinese takeout shop in the building, in response to neighbor objections to the initial traffic plan). In fact, even the month we approved that proposal in City Council, I told several of the nearby residents that I was not actually expecting it to get built even if we did approve it, and that prediction seems to be coming to pass. Now that Massachusetts allows delivery services for cannabis – and with the continued high prices of legal cannabis products due to continued federal prohibitions on interstate transportation of those products – the customer demand for physical retail spaces seems likely to remain pretty low, especially now that the hype has died down…

Accessory Dwelling Unit Reforms

The Newton City Council is on the verge of passing another round of reforms to our ordinances on the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), sometimes colloquially known as “in-law apartments.” These smaller, separated units of housing on existing lots, usually primarily occupied by a Single-Family Home, not only add to Newton’s overall housing stock without much wider impact, but they also specifically help families find proximate housing for elder relatives and adult children (including those with disabilities) or help “big house” elder owner-occupants find a bit of extra rental income to be able to stay in their homes longer or to be able to afford historic preservation (especially if the unit is a traditional carriage house). But, with the partial exception of the latter carriage house examples, which are already allowed by-right in non-historic districts, these ADUs have not always been easy to build or set up under Newton’s rules, which has discouraged them from being created. So, the purpose of the proposed amendments to our ADU ordinance is to make them easier to create in Newton.

You can read a summary of the proposed Accessory Dwelling Unit reform here. The basics are as follows: The first proposed change is to remove a four-year “lookback” period that is currently required, which would allow for planning and building of ADUs in new construction, rather than only allowing them after the main house has existed for at least four years. This would allow, for example, a family that is building a new home to plan from the beginning to have an ADU space for their parents or children, without having to wait. 

The second proposed amendment is to allow more detached ADUs by-right (instead of by special permit), like we already allow for many carriage houses, if limited to 250sf – 900 sf, or 50% of total habitable space, whichever is less. 

The third proposed amendment, because these detached ADUs are smaller buildings than the main house but are still sometimes larger than a typical shed or garage, is to modify the setback requirements from the property line for detached ADUs to equal either half of the setback required for the principal building in that zone, or 7.5 feet, whichever is greater. (Currently, accessory buildings of all other uses require only a 5 foot rear and side yard setback, with the front setback equal to that of the principle building.) This should also help mitigate issues like air conditioner noise, light spillover, and the like from bothering neighbors across the property line. However, the Zoning & Planning Committee removed a draft provision that would have required fencing or screening plantings between these ADUs and the property line when the accessory structure was built as close to the line as allowed (if closer than the main building).

Some other rules remained unchanged. For example, although the wording will be clarified, the requirement of owner-occupancy on the site is not being dropped. An accessory apartment can only exist on a lot if the owner is actually living in one of the buildings there. This is controversial because while it is intended to discourage construction of large numbers of ADUs for investment properties by absentee owners, it also means that homeowners who have to relocate permanently to an assisted-living or nursing home facility will have to close down their ADU once they have moved away, and they will no longer be able to generate that extra rental income that might help them pay their bills.

Your Feedback Needed: Tree protection improvements?

There are several pending policy decisions before the City Council where we could really use some input from the public to help shape our final drafts. The one I will cover this week is: Tree protection on private lots.

Newton City Council is currently debating how to reform our “Tree Ordinance” for what we might call “elective” removal of trees on privately-owned lots. The proposals do not really affect the removal of dead or diseased trees, or trees with an imminent hazard, and they do not affect special permit or 40B projects. But they do govern how the City regulates the optional removal of trees, as is the property right of the owners. In some cases these owners are development companies or rental property landlords, or even commercial building owners, while in other cases they are owner-occupants. When a mature tree is removed, it takes decades for a newly planted tree to get back to the same level of air quality improvement, decarbonization, and water runoff retention. 

Should owners have to re-plant new trees when they choose to remove a mature and healthy tree? Should they have to pay a mitigation fee reflecting how long it takes to regain the benefits of the removed tree? How should such a fee be scaled based on the size of the tree, while still being reasonable? What should the minimum-sized tree covered by this ordinance be? How do we discourage needless clear-cutting of lots for construction projects while still meeting our housing goals? How do we balance tree protection with other needs like wheelchair ramps, minor additions, or accessory dwelling unit construction? Should abutters be guaranteed a notification of a tree removal permit request, so that they can discuss it with the owner in a neighborly way or ensure their own property is not damaged during a removal? How can we reduce or mitigate costly water runoff changes for adjacent properties when large trees are removed? What regulations need to exist for construction projects to prevent damage to healthy trees’ root systems, especially when they cross property lines? 

These and other thorny questions are the ones being considered by the Programs & Services Committee of the City Council, as well as the Parks, Recreation, & Culture Department’s urban forester, and various citizen volunteers. It can be very challenging to balance the private property rights with the community needs and good relations between neighbors. Do you have thoughts on any of these questions, or others I didn’t lay out here? What have your experiences with tree removals (on your property or nearby) been like? I’d like to hear from you!

Cuba Report

In late August and early September, I had the incredible privilege to take a 10-day delegation trip to Cuba with a diverse group of folks from Minneapolis and Greater Boston, including other City Councilors and various peace activists. The trip was organized by the Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective through the US State Department’s “Support for the Cuban People” license, which allows travel to Cuba under specific, strict conditions, including maintaining a packed daily schedule and not meeting with political officials or government officials. We were hosted at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center’s dormitories in Havana; they are an ecumenical faith-based organization on the island.

We toured Havana and visited the Bay of Pigs on an amazing educational trip to learn about Cuban history, the country’s arts and culture scene, and the extremely damaging effect of the longstanding US economic blockade. This type of blockade has never been applied as sweepingly, as vigorously, as consistently, or for as long against any other country in the world. Many other countries with which the US government disagrees have been able to reach accommodation with US officials to trade freely without being forced to make significant political changes domestically, which is the condition under which the US blockade would end unless otherwise repealed. 

Not only does the extremely strict economic blockade on Cuba create immense hardship and suffering for the Cuban people (without actually forcing that political outcome preferred by the Americans), but it also hurts many people in the United States, from US farmers to biotechnology sector workers to ordinary Americans. 

For example, Cuba’s state-owned biotechnology research and development teams have been unable to partner with American firms to complete development of and mass-produce low-cost medication to forestall the need for amputation in people with diabetes, especially poor patients. They have also been working on vaccines for various cancers, Alzheimers, and Parkinsons, which could at the very least improve the quality of life of many Americans, but our government will not currently allow these kinds of scientific partnerships. (The Obama Administration briefly eased some of these rules, and agreements were signed in places like Massachusetts, before the Trump Administration banned them again, but the Obama-era rules have not been restored.) 

The political and economic system of Cuba is a matter for the Cuban people to decide internally, and in many respects it is already a country and society like many others around the world, despite the exaggerations of the American media. Decades of US military incursions and US-backed terrorist attacks by Cuban exiles as part of an undeclared war since 1959 have left the country on a kind of permanent war footing, unsurprisingly. 

We were able to see this firsthand and speak freely with many people to understand their perspectives and the systems of popular consultation that exist in the Cuban system, even if it is set up differently from our own system. (For example, today Cuba will hold a national referendum on sweeping reforms to the country’s laws on families, including marriage, adoption, and custody, but the outcome is not a foregone conclusion and follows years of public debate and feedback.) 

The blockade’s continuation is unconscionable, not only for the Cubans, but also for our own people. A political choice compelled by economic siege is not a choice at all. It is well beyond time to make peace and end the blockade.

You can hear more from me on my trip in my recent podcast episode about it, and I will also be appearing on a panel in Somerville on Sunday October 9 with my fellow Boston-area delegation members (moderated by Boston City Councilor Kendra Lara, another opponent of the US blockade.)

The best way to learn about Cuba is to visit, if you can. This is most easily done through group trips that can obtain all the necessary US government approvals. (I can’t speak to the specific content of the trip, compared to the one I went on, but the Mayor’s Newsletter earlier this year mentioned that Newton Community Education is sponsoring a trip for Newton residents later this year focused on arts and feminism in Cuba. I think it is already sold out now.) And Witness For Peace Solidarity Collective regularly runs delegation trips to Cuba, as well as Colombia and Honduras, to show American policymakers and activists the harmful effects of US foreign policy in Latin America.

Newsletter: Juneteenth Weekend and office hours, Chestnut St safety meeting, Green Line station renovations, Northland progress

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

Have a good long weekend! But first, a few quick updates on the two weeks ahead…

Office hours tomorrow

My Newton Highlands Village Day office hours were a huge success this past weekend, and tomorrow’s weather forecast looks great as well. So, I will be holding Waban office hours on my porch tomorrow (Saturday 6/18) from noon to 1:30 PM.

Juneteenth Newton Festivities on Sunday

On Sunday from noon to 4, please check out Newton’s Juneteenth festivities. From the FORJ NNHS site, here’s a description:

This year, Juneteenth celebrations hosted by FORJ NNHS will be at the Walnut Street side of Newton North High School. Vendors including Black-owned businesses, food trucks, performers, DJs, kids' activities, and art exhibits will make this a fantastic family day out (it's also Father's Day!)...

And from Historic Newton about the day’s planned activities:

Historic Newton is collaborating with the New Arts Center for a public reading of Frederick Douglass' 1852 speech about the meaning of July 4. Also learn more about the history of Juneteenth at the event.

Chestnut St Project Meeting: Beacon St to Comm Ave

Your Ward 5 Councilors invite you to a virtual meeting (Wednesday 6/29 at 6 PM) about Chestnut St road/sidewalk/safety work from Beacon St to Commonwealth Ave.

DPW will detail its planned response to community input several years ago regarding safety along this twisty 20 MPH stretch. As a preview: expect more sidewalks (finally) and some new crosswalks. But this is geologically and topographically a difficult section to improve, and so you’ll need to tune it to get the details of the plan.

(Zoom info for this meeting is available upon request and was mailed to abutters yesterday.)

Green Line Stations Renovations Meeting on 75% Designs

More than a year ago, the T announced plans for D Line station accessibility improvements in Newton at the Waban, Eliot, and Chestnut Hill stations (Newton Highlands is already in progress separately). Next Thursday (June 23) at 6 PM, they will present to the public by Zoom their 75% designs for these stations and solicit one last round of public feedback/input. You can sign up for the meeting here.

The most important change for the stations in question, according to their presentation in the spring of 2021, would be adjustment of platform heights for level-boarding by wheelchairs/strollers with no ramps or operator assistance (although this also means retiring some current equipment). The four stations will get longer and higher platforms in two phases, unless they have changed the plan since last year. Eventually, these improvements (especially platform length) also mean more carrying capacity on the line for all passengers, not just those with accessibility challenges. The biggest aspect for public input will be the planning for accessible pathways and second-egress paths from each platform. 

The estimated construction start on this work remains this fall, as far as I know. Unfortunately the upcoming work does mean more shuttling, although in a more constrained way than before: D Line closures/shuttling will occur again on Sept 24-Oct 2, Oct 8-16, and Oct 22-30. First period will include track work/crossings around Waban Station. Second period will include track work/crossings around Eliot Station. Final period will include the same at the Houghton Gardens crossing near Chestnut Hill. (On days with Fenway Games, there will be express shuttle service from Riverside into the city via the Mass Pike.)

By the way: Green Line service is not being directly affected so far by the emergency cuts to the service levels on the Blue, Orange, and Red lines announced today.

Northland work timeline update

A resident helpfully reminded me in person yesterday that I had inadvertently forgotten to include an update on the latest schedule for Northland project work in the Needham St and Upper Falls area in my last newsletter. So, I checked in with their team this afternoon to get an update: Things have been a bit quiet (although with some less noticeable work happening) while the state completes its DOT project along Needham St and while the company goes through the various permitting processes and lines up its various construction materials (despite the supply-chain hurdles everyone is experiencing).

In a few weeks from now, there should be some more building demolitions and underground utility work happening on the Northland site. After that, later in the summer, there will be ongoing below-grade demolition work and parking garage excavation.

The first building that will actually be built (some time later this year) is the Mobility Hub / Apartments building up against Needham St. The Northland team is also still moving forward with the city approvals processes for the planned Splash Park by the Greenway and the brook daylighting across the site.

As always, there is a neighborhood Liaison Committee that meets periodically to discuss more granular timetables of work and to raise specific concerns or problems that neighbors are experiencing as the work progresses. Councilors Crossley of Ward 5 and Ryan of Ward 8 are your point-people for that group, along with the appointed neighborhood members. So, I’m just providing a very broad overview here.

Newsletter: Highlands Village Day office hours tomorrow and other upcoming events (plus a recap of recent events)

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

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!

Open letter from 4 Councilors on the Conlon shooting inquest report

Dear Mayor Fuller,

Your recently released summary of the inquest and report of the Conlon shooting paints a misleading picture of the facts and conclusions in the report from the judge. In addition, we were most disheartened to read the out-of-context salacious findings about blood toxicology, mentioned but not emphasized in the report, which seemed to only serve to smear a victim in crisis, at a low moment in his life that does not fully represent his humanity. The lack of empathy for the victim and his family is stunning, but it is also a troubling message to send to other families and individuals struggling with mental health and addiction challenges.

The District Attorney's press release elides or glosses over key contextual details. Both press releases do not fairly represent the full context of the report's overall conclusions. During a period in our history when trust between our community, our elected officials, and those charged with protecting and serving the public is fragile and being rebuilt – to misrepresent the report’s findings seems a poor choice at best and destructive to the community trust we are working to re-build.

The inquest report's narrative strongly suggests (and the report actually outright says twice) that non-violent de-escalation was working, despite a seemingly frightening environment for the victim, until he was provoked by a misfired beanbag shotgun, deployed opportunistically when the victim had put down the knife. "The on-scene commander...issued the order to abandon efforts at de-escalation and engage Conlon with the less-than-lethal, an effort that was unsuccessful and resulted in Conlon's death." He only picked up the knife again and began charging in response to unsuccessfully being fired on by the beanbag shotgun. The original plan was to wait him out until a professional negotiator could arrive. This approach had been working until then.

The inquest report does not actually exonerate the shooting, but rather simply finds that it was lawful and "reasonable" within the extremely generous bounds of the law in the exact moment it occurred, isolated from the decisions leading to that moment. It notes the unsuccessful escalation (instead of two other scenarios: continuing to wait or an inherently risky but instead successful beanbag shot) led to the fatality. The report only determines that the exact moment of lethal force was legally permissible – but makes a strong case that that moment only happened because of other decisions leading directly to that during the incident.

We the undersigned have compassion and sympathy for all involved in this tragic event in our beloved city. Compassion can exist simultaneously with the acknowledgement that better choices could have been made which could have prevented the death of Mr. Conlon.  It is not necessary to exonerate all involved and disparage the victim for the city to move forward. What is necessary to move forward is the truth, as complex and as unsettling as it may be. This report was not an exoneration. It was a legal finding. The public relations spin is an injustice to the victim, and the political insistence on "unequivocal” “support" for personnel who made an avoidable bad call in the field with deadly consequences, per the report, does not improve public trust, healing, or future responses to similar crisis situations.

Sincerely,

Brenda Noel, Ward 6 Councilor

Bill Humphrey, Ward 5 Councilor

Alicia Bowman, Ward 6 Councilor-at-Large

Holly Ryan, Ward 8 Councilor

Memo from City Councilors on NPS Budget FY23

Dear Madam Mayor,
The undersigned City Councilors concur with the March 31st resolution of the School Committee that "the 4 million dollars worth of cuts in the proposed FY23 [NPS] budget to reach the allocation are too deep and too painful."

We also feel so strongly, like the School Committee, "that the current budget allocation of $262,070,208 is not enough to run the schools without serious negative impacts on our kids," that we are prepared to exercise our procedural options as City Councilors on the proposed allocation when it comes before us, if the funding gap is not closed or nearly entirely eliminated on the allocation side.

Furthermore, we disagree with the argument that ARPA funding would be an inappropriate solution here ("using one-time funding sources to address this structural deficit in operations is not responsible") on the basis that these funds were intended to be used for helping to resolve the recent emergency and its ongoing effects, and we believe that continued or escalated funding for staff resources at a critical juncture in getting childhood development back on track is a short-term but necessary expenditure.

Failure to address these behavioral and literacy issues, among others, that cropped up during the remote learning will only end up adding much greater expenses to the school district later down the line. If we spend ARPA resources now, we can correct these problems quickly and then make appropriate further reductions in future years, if needed. But this is a responsible short-term use of one-time funds.

Sincerely,
Councilors Bill Humphrey, Holly Ryan, Alicia Bowman, Brenda Noel, Marc Laredo, Emily Norton, Maria Greenberg, Victoria Danberg, Chris Markiewicz, Tarik Lucas, Julia Malakie, and Pamela Wright

New senior center plan moves forward

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

In 1919, one of the post-World War I strikes in Boston focused on the deteriorating conditions and antiquated features of public buildings that were so old that they had been constructed before the American Civil War. Today, the United States finds itself with a vast roster of public buildings constructed during the New Deal – much longer ago from the present than the Civil War was from 1919.

These buildings sit in various conditions from great to abject disrepair, in part depending on how well they have been maintained and how easy it has been to retrofit them as times have changed and new features have become necessary. Historic preservation, which can help us avoid losing some of our beloved streetscapes, is generally only successful when significant investment happens over the years to keep these landmarks (or potential landmarks) in good shape consistently.

Preservation also becomes substantially more difficult when a building effectively turns into a stranded asset where continued or new uses cannot cost-effectively be balanced against both ongoing maintenance and major capital upgrades, such as asbestos removal, heating and insulation system replacements, disability access, and modernized communications.

The City of Newton’s Public Buildings Department has been struggling for years now to figure out how to handle this exact challenge at the former Newtonville Branch Library, which is currently serving as Newton’s Senior Center. Not only was it clear that the Senior Center was dated, cramped, and poorly accessible, but also it was unclear if the building could be cost-effectively and practically rehabilitated and reused for that or any other purpose, public or private.

After literally hundreds of community meetings and in-depth analysis of the building conditions, possible locations (or land swaps), and the needs of Newton’s rapidly growing and diverse elder population, the City of Newton made the decision to move forward with preserving the building’s historically significant small stained glass windows and otherwise demolishing and replacing the New Deal building with a larger, modern, and accessible complex and parking structure on the site.

In addition to reincorporating the historic windows, the new Senior Center building will have other architectural flairs that recall both the current building and other major Newton civil buildings such as the main Library and City Hall.

The City’s team is still very interested to hear public feedback on specific potential elements of the building’s look and design.

On Thursday this past week, the Newton Historic Commission took up and rejected a proposed Historic Landmark nomination of the existing building, the former library. It is, with the exception of the small stained glass windows that will be preserved, not especially historic because of how many similar New Deal buildings were constructed and remain standing – many preserved in better condition or with more realistic renovation prospects.

There was still no clear scenario under which the existing building could be rehabilitated and repurposed, which would have made landmarking a more realistic proposition. The building has been in poor condition for a long time and would have required a great deal of money to be brought back to a good condition for reuse.

While it is sad to lose some historic buildings, not all of them can be saved, unfortunately, as the ravages of time and changing human needs alter the costs and benefits to preservation.

The good news is that what is coming next for the site is vitally important and will be a big improvement over the current situation. Here’s what one frequent user of the Senior Center and an advocate of the proposed new building on the existing Newtonville site – my mother! – had to say recently:

“I’m a current user of the Senior Center.  The new Senior Center belongs in a village center such as Newtonville.  Users of the Senior Center can take advantage of the nearby grocery store, restaurants, coffee shops, and other businesses when they come. The Senior Center is an important anchor to the neighborhood.  Being able to interact with the village center is what makes the fabric of our community. We engage with others when we visit the center. Then we go to lunch or coffee with friends where we may run into someone else that we know. This is what makes a livable community. With a Senior Center in a village center, we have many options to get there. It might be by car, but it might also be by bicycle, on foot, by bus, or by train. Although the new senior center won’t have enough on-site parking for everyone, there is plenty of parking available on Highland Avenue, Austin St Lot, and various side streets. This provides more foot traffic for the local businesses which adds to the feeling of community. 

I’d also like to point out that the Senior Center is not just for seniors. The programs are open to anyone. Some just happened to be more focused on topics of interest to seniors such as how to apply for Medicare.  Many of the programs occur during the day, which works for retirees and older people who don’t want to drive at night, but movies, lectures, concerts, and various groups are not age restricted. I’ve been a member of the Chamber orchestra for many years and it’s open to adults of all ages.

Let’s get this new Senior Center built now!”

When it opens, the new Senior Center will quickly be a widely popular and beloved institution in Newton’s community life and a gem in the heart of Newtonville, despite all the heated controversy that has followed the project over the years. In this way, it will follow the same course as one of the most controversial civic projects in Newton’s history, the Newton Free Library, which opened the year I was born, 31 years ago.

MBTA Communities Zoning: Understanding Our Opportunities & Obligations

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

Many Newton residents are probably aware by now that the City of Newton – including staff, Councilors, and the public – has recently been working on a plan to reform and improve the zoning code for Newton’s village centers as part of a comprehensive zoning review and redesign effort now spanning more than a decade. We hope to make our village centers more vibrant for residents and businesses and featuring high-quality uses of available land in high-demand areas. 

By coincidence, the state legislature last year passed into law an “MBTA Communities Act” on multi-family housing that would affect zoning in many of these same areas, the village centers close to transit stops on the Green Line, Commuter Rail, and potentially bus hubs. The state’s view is that suburbs served by the MBTA need to step up how much housing is allowed to be built near these public transit services, especially with plans to add passenger capacity to fixed-rail service, which will require huge investments from the state and probably federal governments.

The MBTA Communities legislation, which reserves a great deal of local control in tailoring its implementation in each municipality, is an exciting opportunity for Newton to solidify these discussions about village centers and transit-oriented land use into a coherent and official plan. In a sense, Newton got a head start on coming into compliance quickly with these new state requirements. It’s also an opportunity, depending on how we choose to structure it, to get more units of both market-rate and low-income housing built in Newton in the coming years.
 

What will be required? What stays the same?

The new state rules will require that certain areas of the city near major transit stops be rezoned in sections to allow for the potential future possibility of 8,330 units of housing in total, including any existing units of housing. It is not a requirement that this many units of housing actually be built, and there is no deadline to reach this benchmark. It simply must be hypothetically permissible for landowners at some point to build by right (i.e. without special permit approval) that many units across all these special zones in the future. That might come in the form of multi-family houses or it might come in the form of apartment buildings, both of which we already see near transit in Newton. (Very large projects could still be required to go through the special permit process, but those allowances would not count toward the 8,330 permitted by right.)

Please note that Newton’s existing, ambitious “Inclusionary Zoning” requirement for including affordable units in market-rate buildings would still be in effect even on by-right construction in these zones. The new zones also wouldn’t override any historic protections or conservation/environmental restrictions, which means those protections are factored into the formula calculating how many units could hypothetically be built in these new zones.

The market conditions over several decades would then primarily dictate what happens from there as various parcels of land in the zones turn over. (Bear in mind that the primary market characteristic of Newton remains its suburban quality and that is still likely to be a selling-point even on many parcels that could now be more densely built under the new zoning code.)
 

Does this mean “density”? It depends!

As noted above, the rezoning would be in sections, since we have multiple transit stops. One zone would need to be fairly large (25 acres) and contiguous, but the other zones would be smaller (5 acres minimum) and probably clustered along the various commuter rail and light rail stations. All added together it would need to be possible for 8,330 units to exist on paper across these zones. 

The required density buildable in these zones can vary quite dramatically depending on the aggregate size of the new zoned areas. For example, if we decide to make it very spread-out (say 555 acres altogether), then a pretty low density of by-right construction would be expected (15 units/acre average), and we would anticipate a lot more three-family or four-family housing in a wider region of Newton in the future. 15 units/acre is, in fact, the lowest possible threshold for density under the state rules. On the other hand, if we made the MBTA-oriented zones very constrained geographically (say 238 acres altogether), we would need to be zoning for larger apartment building projects (35 units/acre average) in or near our village centers. I would expect us to land somewhere in the middle at the end of this drafting process.
 

Low-income housing possibilities

One possible scenario that I am very interested in Newton adopting would be to zone for significant density bonuses near the village centers for mid-sized (think 30-75 units) 100% low-income housing developments (projects eligible for Low-Income Housing Tax Credit development). The automatic density bonus for low-income projects would mean that “market-rate” housing projects would not be allowed to be this dense, at least by right. 

These hypothetical low-income buildings might not get built, of course, based on market financing conditions and tax credit availability, but it would finally give us the chance: One of the biggest deterrents to specialized low-income housing developers has been the slowness and uncertainty of Newton’s project approvals process, and these by-right zones would effectively grant pre-approval in key locations. It would also be a good mission for our new City of Newton Affordable Housing Trust to help out with.

More importantly for the purposes of this law, it would add a significant number of allowed units in a compact version of the new transit-oriented zones, with less disruption to the areas of the city that are not as well served by transit and other infrastructure.
 

Conclusions

Again, I want to emphasize that we have a wide range of options that we can tailor to the specific needs of Newton and its various villages, and this is an exciting chance to address all at once many of the village center objectives we have already been discussing. This legislation is great news for Newton because we were already working in that direction anyway. Embracing this quickly will give us maximum flexibility to fit it to our needs with the most local control and input.

But it should be noted, too, that the MBTA Communities requirements from the state are not optional, either. Some municipalities may try to hold out against it, but it is imperative that Newton not become deadlocked on this issue and face legal consequences and penalties for not implementing it. Unlike some of the lower-population cities and towns with even higher local tax bases, Newton actually does receive a pretty significant amount of help from the state each year on funding our priorities and serving our less-affluent populations. 

Failure to comply with the new MBTA Communities law by the deadline would result in the termination of a number of critical state funding grants (such as MassWorks planning money that has been going toward revitalization and infrastructure planning in less affluent neighborhoods like Newton Upper Falls and Nonantum). Failure to comply would also damage our relationship with various state agencies and officials and thus put at serious risk Newton’s chances of seeing state funding delivered for absolutely necessary upgrades to commuter rail capacity and station accessibility (and maybe even several planned Green Line station upgrades).

The City Council needs to hear from you in the public on how we should implement the MBTA Communities Act zoning requirements here in Newton. I also encourage you to let your Councilors know that you favor a timely implementation of the new law without unnecessary delays.

Newsletter Vol. 2, Week 51: Traffic Calming, Braceland, School Bus Fees, Affordable Housing Trust, Absentee Voting Problems

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.”

More on that in the new year.

Newsletter Vol. 2, Week 46: A big month for affordable housing policy, infrastructure updates, Land Use news, and much more

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

Time for another newsletter and there’s a lot to report. Topics include a Needs Assessment survey, D Line track work and shuttle updates, a Chestnut St road work update, the return of the winter parking ban (for now), Walker Center acquisitions by the city, Affordable Housing Local Preference reform, a resolution on a Real Estate Transfer Fee For Affordable Housing, Land Use matters of note (at Four Corners, Grove St, and Newtonville), public employee vaccination, a nip bottle ban next year, school bus fees, accountability for election administration mistakes, and the annual tax classification.

I wish you all a happy and safe Thanksgiving next week.

ARPA: Needs Assessment Survey

One use of ARPA emergency federal funds here will be a local Needs Assessment, basically figuring out what kind of gaps in city programs & services we have for vulnerable and low-income populations in Newton. Then we'll try to develop or expand services with other, ongoing sources of funds. I already participated in one focus group (among several) on this issue, but we want to hear from the public at large.

So: What are some things we should look into? We have a general survey. (Pass it along to any Newton residents you think should fill it out!)

Please complete the survey by NOVEMBER 30th.

English: http://research.net/r/NewtonNeedsSurvey

Translations (Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, & Brazilian Portuguese): http://research.net/r/NewtonNeedsSurveyTranslated

The survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. Responses will remain confidential.

MBTA D Line update

The latest from the MBTA today: On the Green Line D Track and Signal Replacement Project, track inspections, trackwork items identified by those inspections, and the testing and activation of new signals between Eliot and Brookline Hills stations are starting to wrap up. Weeknight work from Riverside to Fenway Station will continue Monday, November 22, through Wednesday, November 24, while crews conduct signal testing and complete electrical signal cutovers. [...] While this work is occurring, shuttle buses will replace D Branch service between Riverside and Brookline Village. Visit the D Branch alerts pagefor the latest information about service changes. Crews will pause work for the Thanksgiving holiday after start of service on Thursday, November 25 until Sunday, November 28.

Chestnut St road work update

Preparation work for Chestnut St repaving is continuing this month between Beacon St and Commonwealth Ave. The City Council just allocated a couple hundred thousand dollars for re-lining old, worn-out water and storm drain pipes under the street in that section. This is all a precursor to next year’s re-paving work. We’re also cautiously optimistic at this time that there can (and will) finally be an expansion of sidewalk and crosswalk infrastructure in parts of that section, where possible, to make a safer pedestrian experience there as part of that project.

If you live in that section, you may be experiencing water flow difficulties at the moment. This is because the temporary bypass pipes have a much more limited carrying capacity than the standard pipes. Unfortunately there’s no good way around that, which means during this pipe maintenance phase there will be problems during peak usage periods. We understand your frustration, but it won’t be for very long.

Winter parking ban returns (for now)

In contrast with last year’s emergency suspension of certain parking rules to accommodate extra people being in Newton during the pandemic, Newton’s citywide “Overnight Parking Ban” will go back into effect this winter on Wednesday, Dec. 1 through Thursday, March 31, 2022. Parking on City streets will be prohibited from 2 AM to 6 AM.

However, Mayor Fuller also urged residents to weigh in on the future of the winter parking restrictions – long a hotly contested policy – with feedback to her and the City Council: “Feel free to let me and the City Council know your thoughts about the Overnight Parking Ban. Keep it? Shorten it? Eliminate it? What do you think?”

Emails have been flooding in to us since last night with people’s opinions on both sides. Some residents have been ready to end the ban for years, while others believe it is an important limiting factor on student populations parking near Newton’s various college campuses or on street parking from dense residential developments if they don’t have extensive on-site parking.

I look forward to continuing to hear from everyone on the pros and cons.

Walker Center Acquisitions

In Ward 4, Newton is on the verge of making some property acquisitions on Hancock St & Grove St. These are portions of the Walker Center properties currently being sold off. One part will be used for potential future expansion needs at neighboring Williams Elementary School and one part for affordable housing.

The affordable housing component is to acquire four existing historic district homes (totaling 14 bedrooms currently) and (after renovation) make them deed-restricted permanently affordable housing for families to live right by the school. The houses are in good shape inside and should need relatively light renovations and some conversions of a few bedrooms back into family common space.

The rest of the Walker Center site that isn't being purchased by the city (including the Walker dormitories) is expected to be coming forward as a Special Permit residential project of some kind. But that's a private effort so we don't know the specifics yet.

Federal emergency ARPA funds will be used for this purchase. So, the Council was asked to authorize the Walker Center acquisition agreements (which we did this week), but we will not be voting directly on the expenditure of funds.

Local Preference Reform Passes

The Local Preference Reform (covered in a previous newsletter) passed unanimously on November 1 and will reduce the affordable housing lottery requirement from 70% of units being reserved for local applicants to 25%. A study had determined that the 70% Local Preference policy was not achieving its expected objectives and was reinforcing existing diversity gaps.

One concern that came up during the reform debate was about Newton residents with disabilities who need access to affordable housing. However, this was also not really being addressed by the Local Preference policy, because many of those residents require either physically accessible residential units or special services for cognitive disabilities (or a combination of both) and because most of those residents need extremely low-income units (not just somewhat affordable units). Unfortunately Newton, on the public and private side, is simply not building enough ADA accessible and ultra-affordable housing units. The Local Preference Policy wasn’t helping that population because the type of housing needed doesn’t exist yet. This is one example among many of how the well-intentioned policy wasn’t working as hoped and why it needed to be reformed. (We will have to continue working on other tracks to try to achieve the unmet needs we have identified.)

Resolution on Real Estate Transfer Fee For Affordable Housing

This week the City Council unanimously approved a resolution to the Massachusetts legislature in support of a real estate transfer fee local option that (if adopted) would help us to raise funding for the Affordable Housing Trust we are expecting to create before the end of this term. (The Zoning & Planning Committee passed that proposal this week.) 

If the state were to allow such a transfer fee, it would be set locally to account for local conditions and preferences. The fee, split between home buyers and sellers, could be set between 0.5% and 2% (or 6% in the case of a high-value speculative flip) and it could be set to apply to almost every residence or just residences over a certain sale price. 

If such a fee had been in place in the last few years, depending on the rate and threshold, it would have generated anywhere from several million to $30 million per year in new revenue dedicated to the production and preservation of affordable housing. And with home prices rising so quickly, the fee would likely have been equivalent to just a few months of appreciation.

But right now it’s all hypothetical until the state establishes this local option.

Learn more about the proposed state legislation from the Transfer Fee for Affordable Housing Coalition.

Cannabis Store Updates: Garden Remedies and Union Twist

This week the City Council voted to lift the appointment-only system at Garden Remedies, Newton’s longest-operating cannabis store (and previously medical marijuana establishment). If the removal of appointment-only at Garden Remedies becomes a problem, City Staff has the ability to re-impose it later. But some Councilors made the case that we're actually alleviating a problem of people showing up without an appointment, quickly making one outside on their phones, and then waiting around in the parking lot. Now that many cannabis stores are open in the region, congestion outside these businesses has largely subsided and it seems likely that the rest of the stores in Newton will also be granted an end to the appointment-only system as they reach the end of their trial periods after opening.

The City Council’s Land Use Committee unanimously recommended the revised Union Twist special permit for approval at Four Corners, since all the state requirements were met after revisions to account for vehicle flow around the site and there was not a valid reason under state rules to deny the request. Based on how light the traffic has been to some other cannabis locations like Redi near Route 9, I am not expecting heavy traffic from this site either, as had previously been a concern from neighbors. The full Council approved this Special Permit unanimously on November 1.

1114 Beacon St Condos Approved

Also in Four Corners, 1114 Beacon St (the former ApGuJung site) has gone through many iterations as a proposed project and is now finalized, it seems. Previous ideas had included a mixed-use business and residential project or an all rental residential project, but in the end the developer received unanimous approval this week for a 34-unit residential condo project with 6 permanently affordable units. (A basic summary is included in this document, although some final minor tweaks were made after this version.)

275 Grove St Life Sciences Project Moves Forward

At 275 Grove St, next to Riverside, the proposed life sciences project there received some last-minute compromises to get a feasibility study for clean energy in the building instead of fossil fuels. Renewables advocates are making the case that this study will conclusively show financial advantages for renewables in this particular project. With those final energy amendments included, the proposal passed unanimously this week. There had been a lengthy debate and hearing of neighborhood concerns and questions about this project, which will form part of a broader life sciences hub with the Riverside Station redevelopment project.

Public Employee Vaccination

​​Programs & Services Committee held a discussion in early November on Councilor Gentile's resolution in favor of requiring all City of Newton employees be mandated to get vaccinated against covid-19. Non-union employees are already required to do so. Union bargaining has been dragging a bit on the matter – not because of the vaccination requirement itself as far as I can tell from the outside, but rather on the compensation for termination for failure to comply. The full Council approved the resolution this week with the aim of strengthening the bargaining position of the Administration.

Nip Bottle Ban Next Year

One upcoming policy change went through a different body outside of the City Council, as noted in Mayor Fuller’s latest newsletter:

Newton’s Licensing Commission on Monday passed a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages by retail establishments in containers less than or equal to 100 milliliters (also known as nips), effective June 30, 2021. The delay allows retailers time to sell their inventory. The goal of the ban is to help curb littering of these small, single-use bottles.

Docket Review: School Bus Fees and Election Problems

Bus fees: #393-21: Resolution from the City Council to the Mayor re school bus fees and the FY23 budget - COUNCILORS HUMPHREY, BOWMAN, CROSSLEY, DANBERG, GREENBERG, KALIS, KRINTZMAN, LAREDO, LEARY, LIPOF, LUCAS, MALAKIE, MARKIEWICZ, NOEL, NORTON, OLIVER, RYAN, AND WRIGHT, requesting a resolution from the City Council outlining the views of the Council to the Mayor on the upcoming budgeting process for school bus fees.

Explanation: This has been an ongoing point of contention for some time now and we’ve taken it up several times this term. But in an effort to stop taking it up during budget debates and instead to make our opinion known before the budget is drafted and locked in, we’re aiming to weigh in next month. The resolution is likely to call for either free bus passes or “significantly reduced” bus fees, depending on the exact number of Councilors leaning one way or the other. Due to the complicated structure of the budget process under Newton’s City Charter and the current placement of the school bus system under the Newton Public School budget, the Council doesn’t have a direct role or vote on this matter – except insofar as we can make a suggestion to the Mayor to move additional funding (in the next budget) to NPS from what we refer to as “the city side of the budget,” so that they (NPS and School Committee) can include replacement funding in “their” budget. The Council can’t adjust the funding even during the budget process because our Charter only allows us to reduce spending, not move it around or increase it. The School Committee would need more money moved to their side of the fence to be able to make a change, and so the resolution will likely be about that specific point.

Election Problems: #414-21 Request for a discussion on improving election administration - COUNCILORS KRINTZMAN, BOWMAN, CROSSLEY, DANBERG, GREENBERG, GROSSMAN, HUMPHREY, KELLEY, LAREDO, LEARY, LIPOF, LUCAS, MALAKIE, MARKIEWICZ, NOEL, AND RYAN requesting a discussion with the Clerk’s Office about problems that arose during the 2021 municipal election[s], including voting by mail. The discussion should result in recommendations or improvements the City of Newton can make in elections practices for the future.

Explanation: We are aware that mail-in/absentee voting did not go very well this year in the March 2021 special election, the September preliminary election, and the November general election – with some out-of-state residents (including students) not even receiving their ballots until after the election. Our new City Clerk, Carol Moore, who did not start in Newton until after the 2021 elections process, comes to us from Washington state most recently, where all elections are conducted entirely by mail. We believe she can help get us on the right track with future mail-in voting, so that this disenfranchisement problem is not repeated.

There were also some formatting problems with the website uploading of the official final results of the November 2021 election. It didn’t affect the outcome of any election and the actual vote tallies were never in doubt, but it created some confusion, and we will likely discuss that as well to try to avoid that issue in the future.

Property tax classification

Every year the City Council is required to vote on how to balance the relative weight of property taxes on residential versus commercial properties. (The city gets about 90% of its property taxes from residential taxes regardless because of the composition of Newton, but we have some leeway around the margins.)

Last year we made an unusual downward tax adjustment on commercial taxes (balanced by a matching increase on residential taxes) in order to try to reduce business collapse risk in the first year of the pandemic, which (it was argued) would have burdened residents far more in the long run. (I have requested data on the effect of this change in practice last year.)

This year the Mayor's Administration requested (and the City Council agreed) that we should reset the rate balancing between the commercial and residential tax base toward our previous balance from before the pandemic, i.e. maximizing the commercial balance. Due to rounding rules on the tax levy, which is limited by Prop 2 ½, this rate also allows us to collect the most revenue we’re permitted to raise, without leaving money on the table.

We are somewhat constrained no matter what by how much residential property values surged this year. Our levy increase citywide is limited by state law (as noted above) and that boxes us in on some points.

So, as usual, residential taxes will be going up a little, but a bit less quickly than if we had chosen to set a lower commercial tax balance like we did last year.

My Re-election: A Big Thank You (and Reflections)

The results are in! Thank you, Ward 5, for entrusting me with another term as your Newton City Councilor. This is your triumph, more than it is my own.

We should also take a moment to reflect on the significance of today’s results: Two years ago, you elected me by just 34 votes. I focused on constituent services and committee work (especially on behalf of seniors and vulnerable populations), but I also stuck to my big, bold ideas on climate action and affordable housing. I didn’t take a narrow election as a reason to back down from the platform that got me elected. When it was time for difficult policy conversations amid protests on policing last year, I didn’t shrink from the challenge. Today I've been re-elected by a 26-point margin, confirming that approach.

Moreover, the opposition campaign and the multiple PACs targeting me this year with thousands of dollars decided to make the Ward 5 Councilor race explicitly a referendum against me personally, against comprehensive zoning redesign, and against the Defund the Police movement for a new public safety model. Today's 63% re-election victory is instead our mandate for a very different platform and a positive, uplifting, welcoming vision of our future.

The people of Ward 5 resoundingly rejected the absurd smear tactics, negative advertising, and disinformation campaigns – not just because the voters here know me personally (many of you have known me my whole life and more of you met me face-to-face in the past three years), but also because that is simply not who we are here. 

I give great thanks to the more than 1,500 people who voted for me because they know the real me, whether they already mostly agreed with the “slate” of candidates I was on – or whether they were “crossing over” to vote for me because they know I have our Ward 5 interests at heart and will listen to them, even if we don’t always agree on everything.

I've never shied away from telling voters what I believe and why, in writing or door-to-door. When people disagree, I listen, but I also make my case for why they should come around to my position instead. I was raised to practice service to my community through leadership, not to check which way the winds are blowing first. I’m fighting for you every day – and for what I believe in.

I can see in today's re-election victory the progress my supporters and I are making in swaying public opinion voter by voter, even on hot-button and controversial issues. Clear, consistent, and open communication of my deeply-held values and policy positions earns trust. So does putting in the hard work for my constituents every day to make their lives better and easier.

We can get potholes patched, so to speak, and have fearless moral clarity in history-making struggles at the same time. And indeed my materialist political philosophy is that in the long run we cannot succeed at the latter without also working on the former. It is by the basics that we may be bold.

It has been a clarifying election this year in Ward 5. In this unmistakable victory today over clearly-defined fault-lines, amid a wave of nasty attacks against me unlike two years ago, there can be little doubt of the direction I should take my time in this office in order to best represent the people of all of Ward 5. My results-oriented approach in office and my cheerful approach in the campaign (including zero negative advertising or mail from my team, once again) has been resolutely vindicated, and I can report that I have personally emerged quite unscathed. Perhaps there is something to that old “Happy Warrior” style of politics after all!

I’m proud and excited to serve Ward 5 in a second term, and I could not have gotten this far without the support of my friends, family, colleagues, and campaign volunteers. This victory belongs to all of us. Now we can build on the work of the past two years: from climate action to low-income housing; from roads, sidewalks, and new school facilities to working with the MBTA on station improvements; from pandemic assistance to outdoor dining; and from senior services and a new senior center proposal to reimagining the future organization and methods of public safety in Newton. And we can build on all of that in this coming term on an even more solid footing than before.

We have proven that we are on the right track and have the confidence of the voters to continue what we have begun. I hope this is a political model that others can emulate and build on as well, elsewhere in N