Somerville’s budget is limited, and while I will continue to advocate for fully funding our priorities, one way we can do more to address community needs is by better partnering with and supporting our city’s exceptional nonprofit organizations. These groups play a crucial role helping our community with housing assistance, economic supports, educational programs, environmental initiatives, and food resources.

As a City Councilor, I will ensure our city supports the efforts of nonprofits and connects residents who are ineligible for or receiving insufficient assistance from city resources with community organizations that can help.

In light of disappearing federal resources, it's imperative that our city's elected officials, in collaboration with our state legislative delegation, advocate for state funding to fill gaps that emerge. We need to continue to provide essential services to our residents, and must take advantage of resources that expand what we can do beyond the restrictions of our municipal budget.

Housing costs in Somerville are expensive for just about everyone. One of the fundamental goals of our city has to be to reduce overall housing costs dramatically for all households. The Council actually has significant power in this area with their control of zoning.

In truth, a lot of Somerville’s capacity for success in lowering prices is dependent on the action of other communities. Somerville has a strong vested interest in statewide housing construction requirements like the MBTA Communities Act, which requires denser housing in other communities who lag behind our own. I will be a strong advocate for the enaction and enforcement of further statewide construction legislation.

We should continue to increase the density of housing units allowed near transit stations, change the incentive structure around development to make permitting and construction of lower market-rate housing more profitable than luxury development, and allow for more mixed-use development on commercial corridors.

We need to speed up the permitting process for new housing, remove unnecessary barriers to development like excessive parking and stairwell requirements, and encourage the conversion of vacant or underutilized lots into housing.

Too many longtime residents, working-class people, and essential workers can't afford to live in Somerville, and reducing market-rate rents alone will never be enough to keep them here. That’s why we must maintain and strengthen our subsidized housing programs.

I will work to protect Somerville’s 20% affordable housing requirement in the Inclusionary Housing Ordinance and push for better connections between residents and existing resources, including Section 8 vouchers, the 100 Homes Program, the Somerville Affordable Housing Trust’s rental assistance program, and other housing support services, so no one is left navigating the system alone.

It is critical our City Councilors actively work to connect residents in need with assistance. I will work to ensure people who need housing assistance get connected with these resources. I will also advocate for a centralized, easily accessible platform that consolidates available housing programs and assistance options, ensuring residents can easily find the support they need.

Despite some progress recently, many of our streets and sidewalks are aging and in poor condition, making getting around the city more difficult, particularly for disabled residents, seniors, and parents with strollers. One of the fundamental ways we can improve Somerville’s mobility is to ensure our sidewalks are in good repair and are accessible. Last year the city released a tracker that shows road and sidewalk repaving and improvement progress; we should use that format to enable resident feedback to which streets are in the most need of repair, and track the areas of highest need as well as plan out the schedule for city wide upgrades. These essential repair projects are an essential complement to other traffic calming and safety measures to ensuring our Vision Zero goal is met.

Completing the city’s Bicycle Network Plan will also make cycling safer and better integrated into our transportation system. The intention of the network plan was to ensure the predictability and completeness of our city’s cycle network, and ensuring we continue implementation that maintains those two principles remains important for the council to secure.

Better integrating the new Green Line stations into our streetscape, with dedicated pickup and drop-off locations and accessible crosswalks, is also key to improving city mobility. While the MBTA manages these stations, one key way we can make them more usable and have them better serve our community’s transit needs is by ensuring the streets around them are optimally used to allow for passengers to easily access stations.

The city continues to struggle with traffic and difficulties with loading and pick-up parking. We need to focus on ways to improve traffic flow, particularly at major intersections and in our squares.

Increasing the availability of “15 minute” parking spaces in commercial areas is essential to keeping traffic moving and avoid double parking. Businesses and particularly restaurants need to have available quick parking to allow for customers and delivery drivers to easily pick up orders. We also have to prioritize curb space designs that provide room for trucks and vans to unload deliveries, and avoid double parking or parking in bike lanes.

With our particularly high density and high number of cars, we need to do everything we can to increase the efficiency of our streets. Post-COVID, we need to reactivate "request walk" buttons, ensuring pedestrians can safely and efficiently cross streets, and reducing unnecessary delays. We should also need to experiment with smart traffic signals that can adjust lights based on real time traffic to improve rush hour backups.

Somerville is an expensive place to rent or own property, and thats true for business owners too. One of the city’s primary concerns should be avoiding vacant commercial space. Vacant storefronts hurt our commercial areas by reducing foot traffic, limiting resident choices in shops, and creating uninviting public spaces. The city can play the role of facilitator to fill vacant spaces and find both short and long term solutions to keep these spaces utilized.

Supporting our local businesses is paramount both to keeping our squares vibrant places and empowering new business owners, but also to help build our city’s commercial tax base. Somerville, unlike many other cities, only sees commercial taxes make up about 30% of our municipal revenue. That leaves 70% of the burden to fall on homeowners, making housing more expensive for everyone. Ensuring businesses in our city are supported and avoiding vacant storefronts helps us across the board in creating a more vibrant and affordable city.

Somerville can take a more proactive and community-based approach to mental health care by placing licensed mental health professionals and social workers in public spaces like libraries, community centers, and teen spaces. The city has been able to do this on interim and emergency basis before, and doing the financial and space planning to ensure we are able to continue to offer these services proactively should be a priority.  Embedding trained professionals and inviting opportunities to access state and city resources should be a function of many of our city-owned spaces, especially where they are likely to be accessible to vulnerable populations.

Massachusetts has developed a strong framework for delivering a full range of mental health and substance use services through the state-administered Community Behavioral Health Centers (CBHC) program. However, Somerville is somewhat disconnected from the nearest CBHC, which is in Cambridge. As a city, we need to do more to make sure we connect residents in crisis with CBHC treatments and state resources. These facilities offer walk-in care and emergency crisis response, as well as long-term supports for people who struggle with their mental health. Strengthening this connection and increasing local visibility of these services will help prevent emergencies for residents, reduce interactions and burden on our police and city emergency response personnel.

Trees do so much for our city—they keep our streets cooler, improve air quality, reduce flooding, and make our neighborhoods more livable. Unfortunately, much of Somerville’s tree canopy has shrunk in recent years, and is under threat in others. We need our Councilors to push for new developments to include public green space, protect the spaces we already have, and expand public green space in both small and big ways.

Enforce the 2019 Tree Preservation Ordinance
In 2019, Somerville passed a Tree Preservation Ordinance to protect trees on private property (in addition to previously protected trees on city owned property). We need to ensure the city is enforcing this critical ordinance, and consider raising the penalty set under this law which establishes a fee for violations at $500, something which large or careless developers often consider a cost of doing business. The council should consider raising this fee, in particular in a way that discourages large developers from violating it.

Better Communicate the Process for Requesting New Trees
In Somerville, tree requests are actually pretty straightforward. It’s fairly easy to request a new tree outside of your home, get a sick or dead tree removed, request pruning, or get someone from the city to inspect a tree for potential issues. Making sure residents know they can, and when they should, put in a 311 request for a tree in their area is something I’ve enjoyed doing while I was a member of the city’s Pollinator Committee.

Caring and Protecting Street Trees
The tree steward program has taken one of the amazing benefits of Somerville—how many residents we have who care about their neighborhoods and nature—and put them into action protecting our city’s trees. We should continue to expand this program and spread public awareness of when a tree on your street might need to be cared for whether its watering, weeding, or cleaning.