Supporting healthy, sustainable community

I believe services that are paid for by progressive taxation and democratically controlled by the public can deeply transform our community. Instead of further privatizing and commodifying residents' needs, we can focus on ensuring we meet our neighbors' needs by investing in public goods and creating more ways for residents to impact our local government. We can build a public education system that nourishes and teaches the whole child instead of teaching to a standardized test, all while ensuring our educators and staff are not paid poverty wages. We must keep our public health promise by building a safe injection facility, as well as implementing trauma-informed services, moving beyond crisis intervention, expanding access to mental health care, and building new city-run medical services like we’ve done during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether it's working to make public transit free at point of service in Somerville or sustainably improving our public parks, paths and green spaces, we can envision a Somerville that is built on a foundation of governance for the public good. Our City Council must focus on improving and expanding public goods.

Creating real public safety and wellness

I believe that in order to build a city that positively and materially impacts our lives, we need to take a comprehensive look at how our whole municipal government functions and reevaluate what our city deems important. We must acknowledge that budgets are moral documents that say what our community prioritizes. Currently, our city budget prioritizes the Somerville Police Department far more than the Office of Housing Stability, Arts Council, and the Sustainability office. We must structurally tackle the roots of our community’s economic, social, and racial injustices instead of prioritizing criminalizing, surveilling, and policing our behavior. We must defund and demilitarize the police, and then invest in life-affirming, non-lethal public goods. Whether it's reviewing all city contracts for racial and gender representation or negotiating enforcement mechanisms for community benefits agreements, we must ensure private entities working on the public's dime and big developers play by our rules. As residents, navigating city hall can turn into a full time job that no one can afford. From top to bottom, we must make our political process transparent and accessible to everyday people.

Expanding city services and public goods

I’ve seen Somerville transform over the past 20 years as my loved ones struggle to see a long-term future here. The Green Line Extension (GLX) project named how environmental racism and poverty impacts equitable access to public transit, but many have already been pushed out as the areas around GLX are developed. We must address the housing crisis by building more affordable and public housing that’s built with union labor, does not privatize public housing, and does not displace working class residents. We must tackle the climate catastrophe with a municipal Green New Deal that protects our tree canopy, ensures public control over energy and climate resilience, and creates good union jobs. We can build more bottom-up democracy through participatory budgeting, fighting to give municipal voting rights to all residents in Somerville, including undocumented people and people over the age of 16. We can ensure no one is left out of our political process by building municipal broadband and providing childcare at public meetings when we can meet in-person again. All of this can help create a more vibrant, thriving community.