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I delayed my newsletter this week to account for the Monday holiday and for the action at the City Council chambers on Tuesday. This one is a bit long, but I hope very informative. As a reminder to new subscribers, this newsletter is expressing my own views and thought process on things that come up as we go along, in addition to being informational about what is going on in the ward and city. It is not a neutral governmental newsletter. (Please reply with any city-related questions/comments to bhumphrey@newtonma.gov whenever possible, for public records reasons.)
Coming Up (Jan 22-26)
Wednesday (tonight): Programs & Services Committee Meeting, 7 PM, Room 211 City Hall - Not much going on this week except four Youth Commission appointments and two Council on Aging appointments.
Thursday: Rescheduled from last week - Upper Falls Area Council Meeting at 7 PM at the Emerson Community Center including appointment to vacant seats and election of officers. (I will not be able to attend the contemporaneous Traffic Council meeting. One of the items is the Highlands business parking district expansion into Ward 5 that I mentioned in a recent newsletter.)
Friday & Saturday: I’ll be at a Massachusetts Municipal Association conference with many of my fellow councilors!
Sunday: 2 PM Ward 5 Democratic Committee (702 Chestnut St in Waban); 3-5 PM US Senator Ed Markey for Re-election campaign office open house in Ward 4 in the Riverside Office Park (275 Grove St)
Note: In the future, if you have a Ward 5 or Newton event coming up that you would like me to mention in the newsletter, please let me know. So far I’m generally just listing some of the events I plan to or am scheduled to attend. There are other important community events at the same time as some of these meetings, and I left them off because I can’t personally be there, but in future I’m happy to include them in the newsletter to inform people.
Docket review
This week in my review of notable docket items I wanted to highlight a docket item that I filed with Council President Albright (Ward 2) and Public Safety & Transportation Chair Auchincloss (Ward 2): #74-20 is requesting a discussion with a representative of the ACLU of Massachusetts regarding the current policy environment on facial surveillance technologies.
On March 4th at the PS&T meeting, we’ll be hearing from Kade Crockford of the Mass ACLU on the policy challenges posed by face surveillance tech and the ACLU’s position that municipalities should “press pause” on any implementation of this technology. Our State Senator, Cindy Creem, is working on a statewide ban in the legislature and our neighboring town of Brookline banned the technology last year. In addition to fairly straightforward privacy concerns, there are also serious concerns that the technology is simply incapable of performing the function it purports to serve in the realm of law enforcement: False positive recognition of faces, particularly of non-white people, remains very high. My view is that we should not have any such technology used by law enforcement at all, but at minimum I think we should all agree that a piece of essentially “junk science” that could potentially be used to arrest and convict an innocent person has no place in any law enforcement system. The presentation on March 4th will go over all of this, and my hope is that my colleagues on City Council might decide to take up a measure to at least prevent the use of the tech for the foreseeable future.
While opposition to mass surveillance technology was one of my earliest policy causes (refer back if you can find it to my testimony to the Newton School Committee just over 10 years ago, when I was still a senior in high school!), this has become a particularly urgent issue in recent years with the rapid proliferation of doorbell camera surveillance across all of our residential streets, not just the usual CCTV cameras around commercial districts and government buildings, especially with the close relationship between these doorbell/alarm companies and many law enforcement agencies in the United States.
Week-in-Review Highlights
This past Monday: Union Twist Four Corners Retail Marijuana Proposal Community Meeting at the Waban Library Center, sponsored by two of the Area Councils, with a presentation by the petitioners and background information on the public process by former City Councilor Schwartz. This is the special permit request (public Land Use hearing Feb 4, 7 pm) for 1158 Beacon St (former Jaylin Cleaners in Four Corners) for a retail marijuana store. My notes on the presentation are here. The process at this point (due to state law and city ordinance) is relatively narrowly focused on specific legally defined special permit requirements, mostly about issues of traffic, public safety, hours, and similar. The Council is unlikely to reject the application based on other grounds as long as those special permit requirements are met. If you have feedback on the overall petition or on ways it could be better, it was recommended that you focus your public comments or emails to the Land Use Committee on those specific criteria (traffic impact, public safety components of the plan, hours of operation, etc.) – and not on the issue of marijuana itself or even on location. Those will largely not be factored in to Council decisions, again, because state law is fairly restrictive and because the City Council already previously authorized this location for retail marijuana during its zoning process for the issue as a whole.
Programs & Services special committee meeting on the referendum guide: For most city elections, the city government tries to provide a neutral informational guide by mail to all voters. Due to changes in state law in 2011 surrounding citizen referendums at the local level, the Law Department asked the City Council to make some changes in our local laws, to adopt certain state guidelines for how to prepare a voter guide for the upcoming Northland referendum. We had some discussion at the Programs & Services committee about whether this would be a one-time change and whether there was a need for a broader review of our procedures around referendums now that we are having them more frequently than in the past and given the changes in state law. Ultimately, our committee unanimously adopted the state guidelines for creating the voter guide for the upcoming referendum.
Joint meeting of the Council & School Committee: We heard an overview of school building conditions & enrollment trends (heading very slightly down overall but with some pinch points in specific schools), updates on current major projects, 5+ years of upcoming NPS projects, and more. A few key takeaways for Ward 5 people: 1. Capacity at the high school level should be tight for a few more years (although equalizing between North and South better) and then stabilize at a more manageable level even as the bubble of students going through the middle schools arrives. 2. The middle school population is now temporarily reflecting the baby boom of just over a decade ago but should stabilize soon, especially with the Oak Hill expansion. 3. Countryside’s long-overdue overhaul and expansion should be getting to the planning phase imminently as promised, so stay tuned. 4. The north side of the city is grappling with Peirce and Underwood not only both being in bad shape but also way under capacity within just the next couple of years, and a working group is meeting this year to figure out what to do about that (which I mention here since it could affect overall renovation cycles across the city even if you don’t have kids in either of those districts). 5. The new Angier has reached capacity but Williams has available capacity and is in good condition so expect some redistricting between the two soon. I think we can all agree on one thing: It's very hard to plan elementary school capacity for kids who haven't been born yet (!) and when it takes 5-6 years minimum to do significant renovations or rebuilds to schools. Fortunately, we all have in mind the disastrous example of the decisions in the 1980s to close and sell off a bunch of the schools to know what NOT to do this time around. That was a consensus at the meeting.
NewCAL (new Senior Center) community meeting: City Staff held another community discussion this past Thursday. A large group of councilors attended and my limited notes are here. (Unfortunately due to how packed the event was, they ran out of handouts and the posterboards didn’t have much info.) Having stricken last year’s initial list of potential sites (Albemarle and any other parks), they presented a list of new, smaller sites under consideration, some of which were pretty surprising to me, and I’m not sure are really being seriously entertained. This felt a bit like a Golidlocks List where some options were insufficient on one end and too difficult or costly on the other end so that certain options would be more reasonable in comparison. The 7 sites with upper-bound cost estimates for each are:
1. Newton Centre triangle lot ($36m, including reconfiguring parking)
2. Existing senior center site ($17m)
3. Former Aquinas Junior College ($18m) - NPS might be displaced
4. West Newton Armory ($35m) - State-owned, this proposal would be instead of affordable housing
5. Newton Ed Center ($114m) - NPS might be displaced
6. West Suburban YMCA ($56m)
7. Newton Police HQ ($103m, including a new police HQ elsewhere, I think)
I apologize if I got any details wrong here and for the lack of additional details, since I didn’t have the handout (which I wasn’t able to find online in time for this newsletter). This should be taken just as very preliminary information about the list under consideration.
Office Hours: I held my first office hours this past Saturday in Upper Falls at the Needham St Starbucks. If you braved the cold and snow flurries to come talk to me, thank you! Continuing my rotation, I currently expect to hold my next office hours in Newton Highlands in mid-February, likely on a Sunday. I will probably hold Waban office hours on a Friday in mid-March, to give Ward 5 residents more options in case weekends don’t work for them. Residents are of course always welcome to come to any of the locations, not just the one closest to them.
MLK Jr Community Celebration: The City Councilors joined a huge turnout at the First Baptist Church this Monday to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. King. While there were many inspiring and radical speeches I could refer to, the one I’ll highlight here was from Pastor Devlin Scott of the NewCity Church, who has rapidly become a fixture at interfaith city gatherings over the past couple years. Here is a passage from his speech:
Acceptance means you make room for people to be who they are — you add another chair at the table; you add another place setting; you move your stuff off the extra chair near you — you make room for people; as they are, whether you agree with them or not. You make room. Whether you have much in common or not, you make room.
Dr. King said it this way, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” — so, let’s make room.
Make room by offering a radical invitation to all people; by showing radical hospitality to all people; by responding with a radical embrace of all people; by rendering a radical love for all people; and by standing with a radical boldness for all people. Let’s make room.
Let’s make room for every single one of our kids to have the best education; whether typically developing or on an IEP; whether from Newton or bused from Boston. Let’s make room.
Let’s make room for the senior citizens and the elderly to age in place; for teachers to have fair compensation and benefits, and for our communities to be as environmentally safe as possible. Let’s make room.
Let’s make room for families to live here; whether that family is a single person or a family of six; whether they make six and seven figures or survive on minimum wage; whether they are liberal or conservative or somewhere in between; whether they born here, brought here or simply chose to live here. Let’s make room.
Let’s make room for affordable housing. Sure, we should consider traffic patterns, overcrowded schools and neighborhood density, but may that never distract us from what is most important – our neighbors. So let’s make room. I don’t care if its “livable” or “right-size,” let’s just make room.
Let’s. Make. Room.
I am your neighbor. Who I am is who I am and I am your neighbor. Will you make room for me?
I’m reminded of Dr. Kings words, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” Could not we understand Dr. King’s work to be summed up in this — let’s make room for others?
Newton is a great city. I’m proud to live here. So I leave you with this: Dr. King had a dream, now we have a mission — an obligation some would say. And Newton, what is our mission this year? Let’s make room for others. Let’s really “know” our neighbors.
State of the City Address by Mayor Fuller: I was part of the City Council’s “honor guard” to escort Mayor Ruthanne Fuller into the chambers last night to deliver her annual message. Here were two passages that particularly stood out to me as I was listening to the speech:
Every day I see examples of so many other City of Newton employees working together and going the extra mile for our residents. In the last two years, we’ve helped 131,265 people when they called customer service and responded to another 112,522 requests that came in through our 311 system; thank you Garrett Ross and your team. We’ve planted 1,849 trees, thanks to Marc Welch, the forestry crew and the Newton Tree Conservancy. We’ve paved 26.5 miles of roads, the most ever in a two year period, with a shout out to Shane Mark and the DPW crews.
we face challenges. Let me name three of them.
Challenge #1: Home prices are rising. Our adult children too often can’t afford to move back and we cannot say that no matter your income or your age, you have the ability to stay here or move here.
Challenge #2: Traffic congestion is growing on our major arteries, cars are speeding through our neighborhoods, and there are still so many streets and sidewalks that require our attention. Drivers, cyclists and walkers too often feel frustrated or unsafe.
Challenge #3: Threats to the environment are mounting.
1/21/20 City Council meeting: We also had a long and unfortunately contentious City Council meeting last night, which ended up featuring four more “maiden speeches” from my fellow freshmen councilors. We confirmed the date of the Northland referendum election for March 3rd, concurrent with the Super Tuesday Massachusetts presidential primary, which is expected to have very high turnout this year. Most constituents I heard from said they wanted that date. I voted for it on the basis that it would be likelier to have greater democratic participation than a standalone election in April and because it was the only option that allowed us to offer five days of in-person “early voting” alongside the statewide election. The other hot-button item last night was a relatively routine measure (already in place for several other commercial restaurant/retail complexes in Newton) to streamline the process for parking minimum relief in one of the commercial complexes in Newton Centre, essentially so that new tenants or expanding tenants do not need 4-18 months to get relief each time they try to move in or add table capacity. Parking minimum reform, which could help many of our restaurants, is something we need to address comprehensively citywide as part of zoning reform but in the meantime, the Council is allowing individual landlords to petition for this streamlined process on a case by case basis. Councilor Wright of Ward 3 argued that this was unfair and risked opening the door to the elimination of parking minimums completely and put the item on “second call” which means it gets a full debate and a full vote, as opposed to an automatic procedural vote by the Council. After an extremely long debate on this item, which is supported by all the councilors for Ward 6 and by the whole Land Use Committee, a single member (Councilor Gentile of Ward 4) exercised a “Charter Objection” to unilaterally delay the item without further discussion. This is the 2nd time that the procedure has been used this month alone, whereas previously I think it was relatively rarely deployed. I might be new to the City Council but I worry that I’ve seen this kind of show before in the US Senate...