Elections, caucuses, ice on the ground, and more zoning

The first two months, as usual, have been insanely busy on Council, but it’s been a number of unrelated busywork activities rather than one theme that would make sense in its own blog post. So, like used to a few years ago, I’m just going to post about a few things that have been keeping me busy in this job the last few weeks.

State-level Candidates

Every year in Massachusetts is a campaign year. Even-numbered years mean that candidates for either the state senate or house compete to get on the ballot. With the announcement by incumbent Senator of the Second Middlesex District Pat Jehlen and subsequent announcement by 34th Middlesex District Representative Christine Barber that she would run for that seat, we have two wide-open races in districts that Medford is a part of. Open house and senate seats are sometimes once-in-20-year opportunities, so many candidates have announced, are going to announce, and have been making introductions to local electeds and seeking endorsements if possible. As a local elected I’m not too involved right now, other than going to events and seeing how the field shapes up. These races will undoubtedly become more high-profile as the primaries approach in September.

Democratic City Committee Caucus

One of the hats I wear is Secretary for the Medford Democratic City Committee. The most important thing the MDCC does is put on the caucuses to elect delegates for the annual State Convention. With a competitive state-level primary — Senator Ed Markey being challenged by Congressman Seth Moulton — this convention is likely to be the most interesting since 2022, when we got a new Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and State Auditor.

Snow

This is the most snow Massachusetts has gotten in years. Last week the keyhole to my apartment building was frozen so solid that I couldn’t turn a key.

I defrosted it with a hairdryer and a neighbor later applied graphite powder.

Naturally, many residents are dissatified with the city’s plowing job, because plowing multiple blizzards and snowstorms is difficult with state policies that cause budgets — and therefore our ability to pay contractors — to shrink every year. I try to judge our DPW comparatively, though, and I heard a lot more complaints and issues in surrounding municipalities than in Medford.

“There’s plenty of parking in Medford Square” is a joke I’ve made multiple times with regards to this photo.

I’ve been doing my best to deal with residents who are dissatisfied with the city’s plowing job. One group of houses in Medford have a very, very large shared driveway and that is effectively a private way. But, while the city plows private ways, it doesn’t plow driveways (at least, it doesn’t anymore). The residents have tried a lot to address this issue, too, including hiring their own plowers, which doesn’t work well because no contractor wants to drive all the way over to Medford during a blizzard just to plow one road. I’ve been emailing the DPW over legal a solution to this, though it’s proven to be a lot trickier than I first thought.

ICE

A few neighborhood chats have popped up in response to the threat of ICE upping its presence in Boston. After the severe backlash to Minneapolis, the threat seems to have died down, but a large number of residents have been organizing neighborhood watch groups behind the scenes to prep for this. I’m not directly involved in the organizing efforts (City Councilors need to specialize after a while — zoning is my thing), but I’ve been following the efforts from friends who are. It’s a nice means of community building.

Zoning

The zoning working group, which I wrote about two weeks ago, has been going well, though our last public hearing has to be rescheduled after tech issues lasted 45 minutes. We had an internal meeting after that, and the main point of conversation was agreeing on a specific timeline to keep zoning changes to (according to our current contract with the Innes Land Group, we need to rezone Medford Square and Tufts/Boston Ave before June). There’s not even really a whole lot of disagreement among the decisionmakers in the zoning changes themselves, just mild differences in opinion of when we should decide on what topic. Anyhow, be sure to tune in March 3rd to see the continued (Zoom-only) Joint Hearing in which we discuss each of these topics in kind.