Kickoff 2025
A lot of local electeds like planning parties. I like parties, but planning them stresses me out. Even so, these community events are a time-honored tradition to engage supporters, signal that you’re running for office again, and raise much-needed funds. So, just like I did two years ago, I had to buck up and get to work.
After spending a whole Saturday making a campaign kickoff video, I asked a friend if I could use her backyard, obsessed over the weather reports a week beforehand, and wrote a speech, which I recited in the video above. I spent a lot of time working on the speech, which summarizes broadly my accomplishments and vision for the coming term:
Hi everybody. I wrote a speech. Thank you for coming out here today. You could have spent a cloudy Saturday doing anything else, but you came out to listen to one of your local elected officials talk about what’s going on in the city and listen to their vision for the future. Everyone here represents the most dedicated and involved residents in the city, and I’m grateful to be in this wonderful community with you.
My name’s Matt Leming, I’ve been a city councilor for one term, and I’m running for a second. Two years ago, I promised transparency, I promised to address Medford’s thinning budget, I promised to invest in more affordable housing to address the housing crisis that the country as a whole is experiencing.
So what have we done over the past two years? This past City Council term has objectively been the most productive that Medford has seen in a generation. With the help of many parents and volunteers, we invested in our public school system. We joined the 94 percent of other Massachusetts cities that passed an override, and in doing so, we saved 40 teaching jobs and got the funding to hire a dedicated crew to patch up our roads and sidewalks. And we recognize that that can be a tax burden on many of us, which is why we we’re now completely rezoning the city, for the first time in almost 40 years, to bring in more commercial revenue, to let us build more affordable housing, mandate greener building practices, while preserving the green spaces and historic buildings that characterize our city. All while being more transparent than any other Council before us. Every single month, we meet to summarize our accomplishments in a newsletter. And not everybody has regular computer access, so every single month, we go to the senior center just to listen to their concerns. We set up a trust to fund affordable housing projects and initiatives, which I’ve been working painstakingly to fund. I worked to institute a first-of-its-kind program to house veteran renters. Because of our historic failure to build and welcome new businesses, we became one of the most underfunded cities per capita in the commonwealth, but now we’re one of the fastest-growing cities, the budget is healthier and healthier, and at the local level, things are looking up, and I have nothing but hope for the future.
But — we’re living in a strange time where that’s not the case nationally. The country as a whole isn’t doing well because of so many people who feel left out, who feel isolated, who felt so disconnected and contemptuous of the way that things were going that they elected what we have today. We have a president who is throwing himself a birthday parade a week after sending the Marines and the National Guard to scare and agitate protestors. Around Boston, federal agents in masks have been abducting our neighbors off the streets and trying to sow fear in the community. Destructive economic policies that only benefit a handful, while we have a person at the top who’s dismantling the federal government as fast as humanly possible.
Many of us have taken refuge in local government, and we’re doing everything we can to push back. We’re working with LUCE to report the whereabouts of ICE agents. This past term, I worked to make Medford into a Sanctuary City, so that the Medford Police Department doesn’t work with ICE on non-criminal matters. With the Democratic City Committee, I spearheaded a campaign to teach migrant communities their right to keep them safer, while others in city hall have held sessions with local migrant communities to teach them their rights.
But it wasn’t me who distributed the red cards personally — it was the many nonprofits who we gave them to so that they could hand them out to migrants. It wasn’t city council who campaigned and voted to invest in our roads and schools — it was the community who did that. It’s not city council who is supporting the rezoning effort — it’s the community who comes out and speaks about it at the many, many meetings we have. Councilors can only work because there are so many people in this city — so many of you — who care enough to make a difference. Without your support, we cannot do anything.
I know that for a fact. When I first moved to Medford, I was an underpaid scientist in a very expensive place that nonetheless had a lot of job opportunities in biotech. I got involved in affordable housing activism pretty quickly, lobbying the city council at the time to institute an affordable housing trust. Shortly thereafter, a few members of that Council encouraged me to run for a seat.
Back then, I was elected for three reasons. First, there were three open seats that year, which is a lot. Second, I wasn’t vague and didn’t try to center myself on every issue, I didn’t try to be friends with everyone, but I made my policies and my ideals very clear and very specific, and that garnered trust, even among those who disagreed with me. I don’t think everyone on this lawn agrees with every single one of my policies, but they know what they are, because I’ve written about them on the internet every two weeks for the past two years. The third reason I was elected my first go around, and the most important reason, is that I knocked on around 8,000 doors and had a lot of conversations with a lot of people.
Now, speaking to as many people as I did, I learned a few things about Medford. We’re a city with a lot of young people and a lot of old people, a lot of renters and a lot of homeowners, a lot of multigenerational residents who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower, and a lot of people who only arrived very recently. And we all call Medford home.
And just as the people I spoke to came from so many different backgrounds, when people talked about city council, I got so many different responses. Some often knew the city councilors very well, grew up with them, could talk about their high school years, and knew their local electeds on a first-name basis. But other times they talked about how they just felt excluded from local politics altogether. Some people moved here for school and they wanted to get involved in their city but couldn't. People who’d lived here twenty, thirty years, raised families, and were still called “New Medford”, in a pejorative way, who couldn’t get the time of day from local politicians unless they’d grown up with them or had a big business.
And I talked to all of these people, I listened to all of them equally, and I did my best to bring them into the fold even if they disagreed with my policies. And my colleagues did the same. I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen so many changes in the city over the past few years — Council used to be an old boy’s club, but then new candidates connected with so many people who felt left out, so we elected to a city council that brought new blood, new ideas. We brought a mindset that didn’t just recognize Medford’s problems, talk about them, and stop there, but approached issues with curiosity, and proposed specific, concrete policies to solve them.
And because of this new energy, these past two years have been the most productive we’ve had in generations. We’ve been building the foundation of Medford’s future. And no, nothing is totally fixed. There are still potholes. We still lack after-school programs for young families, we still lack housing, we still lack options for seniors who might want to downsize. It takes more than a few years to make up for the systemic underfunding of our infrastructure, because for longer than I’ve been alive, we’ve been in a system that’s focused not on growth of our cities, not in investing in our workers, but on focusing wealth on the top, not on empowering the younger generations, but on putting us into debt, not on maintaining our infrastructure and investing in our education, but on short-term gains. We’re not there yet, but make no mistake, this Council, this local government, has been busy laying the foundation.
So here’s a long road ahead — we need to build on that foundation. We need to address the historic housing shortage, we need to help the DPW fix our roads so that they don’t fall into further disrepair, we need to make sure our rezoning is taken advantage of so that we have the funding to do all of that. This next term on Council, we need to keep up the momentum.
Most of all, we’re doing well not because of me or my colleagues, but because of you — the people who have chosen to make their communities here, who have chosen to talk to their neighbors, who have chosen to make Medford as welcoming as possible. In 1961, JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” He said that because the more people contribute to their community, the more their community can give back. I’m hopeful for Medford’s future because of all the people who do so much to give back. The many people who organize their neighbors. I’m hopeful because of the volunteers who chose to sink time into knocking doors and talk to their neighbors, so that we could invest in the next generation. I’m hopeful because of the political organizers working to defend our neighbors from federal overreach. I’m hopeful because of every person who’s sunk their own free time into a board or commission or church or community activist group or political campaign, without pay, so that Medford can have a better future.
It’s because of you. City councilors like myself are only one small part of that. And as I conclude this speech, I do have an ask of you. Running a campaign is not cheap. One mailer to the voters of Medford costs around $7000. Volunteers, website costs, staff — all of this is needed for a campaign, and the sum total usually goes to around $20,000. But a donation to a local political campaign is not an expense, it’s an investment in your community. Now, not everybody’s in a financial position to donate, I get that, and your presence here today is really more than I could have asked for, and I’m grateful. But, if you’re able, I’ve printed out a few QR codes around here, which gives a link to my website, and I’ve set up a little box for checks over there.
And also, be on the lookout for other wonderful city council candidates and school committee candidates who might be popping up in the near future.
Thank you so much for listening to me, and thank you so much for coming out here today!
