SuttonHighNews conducted an interview with each candidate running for an office. Our goal is to provide a more comprehensive look at each candidate so voters can make an informed decision.
SuttonHighNews is not endorsing any candidate. The interviews are being released in a random order with no intent to give anyone more or less time.
All candidates were given the questions in advance. We asked the same questions, in the same order, to each candidate for a particular position.
Q: The Budget: how do we maintain a healthy budget and not run up a deficit or place too heavy a burden on the townspeople?
A: If anyone has the perfect answer to this question, I would love to hear it – I’ll be taking notes! When it comes to the revenues, we have our tax levy from property taxes and some grants from the state, and with those funds we have quite a lot of important work to accomplish: running the schools, police station, fire stations, maintaining roads and public lands, managing water and sewer in some areas, maintaining a library, and continuing all manner of essential administrative services performed by our town employees. The funds collected from property taxes can grow, at most, by 2.5% per year per Massachusetts law. That rate might have made sense during the many years when inflation hovered around 2%, but now we find ourselves halfway through a decade of exceeding that rate by quite a bit. How do we grow or even maintain services for our residents with a budget that is shrinking in terms of purchasing power? There are three levers that you can pull, and none of them are all upside with no downside. We could increase taxes, putting even more pressure on our residents who already have their hands full dealing with inflation, many of whom are retired and don’t have the ability to increase their income. You could cut services, eliminating positions from our town – no one wants that. The third option is to bring in new revenues through construction of new housing and commercial buildings to increase funds coming in through the tax levy. That has to be done carefully, because while growth increases revenue, it also increases expenses. Planning for growth requires careful consideration about the new demands on infrastructure, school enrollment, utilities, and public safety, and whether or not these costs will be offset by the new tax revenue.
So, with no obvious, painless solution to this problem, we’ve been scrambling to try to find efficiencies and to make everything work out. Our town manager has been doing a great job of collaborating with other towns to share expenses. The school system has created a revenue – generating special education transport system and they’ve been applying for every grant that they can. Several years of this kind of financial pressure has yielded some very positive results in terms of making our tax dollars go further, and we’re to the point where the budget is very lean and we’re getting a great deal of value out of our expenditures. Dealing with the budget is a nuanced problem, and a simple solution doesn’t seem to be at hand. While we continue to focus on finding efficiencies, I believe we need to explore options for increasing revenue through growth in a thoughtful, careful way that we’ll all benefit from. I also think we need to be transparent with the public about the size and scope of the problem, and present people with some clear, well-researched data that they would need to be able to make an informed decision about a potential override referendum. That sort of decision has to be voted on at a town meeting, and people need to have confidence that the increased tax rate is not only necessary, but has been structured in a thoughtful, responsible way that would benefit all of our residents while also not pricing people out of our town.
Q: Problem Solving: What do you think is the biggest problem facing our town right now, and what is your plan to fix it?
A: The biggest problems facing our town are, luckily, not unique to Sutton. Overall, we’re doing really well as a municipality. Sutton is a great place to live. We have a beautiful, scenic small town with low crime and an excellent school system. We aren’t burdened with massive crises like having to fix a town-wide water system, or having to fix crumbling building foundations because of pyrrhotite-contaminated concrete, or a large burden of bad debt from mismanagement. In fact, we even have some strategic investments and savings to help us deal with those types of problems should they come up. We are very fortunate in that respect, and a lot of communities like ours have not been so lucky.
I think the biggest challenge facing Sutton is choosing where and how to meet the march of history around us. Prices are way up. Affordability is becoming more difficult across every demographic sector, and we’re looking at budget shortfalls across multiple departments. This gives us a really tough set of choices: we could cut services and try to just make do with less. That reduces the quality of life for people who live here and makes people who are looking to buy a home less likely to move here. We could raise the property tax rate on our already-high property values, and risk pricing regular people out of our community. We could allow new growth and put more strain on our roads, water table, and school system. One thing we can’t do is pretend that things will always be like they used to be.
One thing I’ve noticed when listening to budget hearings is that a large portion of our expenditures comes from healthcare insurance claims from retired town employees. The high cost of healthcare is a complicated, national-level problem that is outside the scope of what a town government can fix. I’m not in the insurance industry, but I have been a Physician Assistant for almost a decade, and I have a deeper understanding of healthcare economics than the average person. One thing I’d like to take on while on Select Board is to take a close look at our policies regarding town employee health benefits, and see if I can offer any insights or recommendations to control costs without short-changing our employees on their well-deserved benefits.
I’m optimistic that we can meet these challenges. Like I said, we’re starting off in a better situation than a lot of our peer communities. We can hope that the state will allocate resources in a way that is more favorable to small towns, but in the meantime we need to try to find our own way through this. I would like to see a little bit of new growth to increase our tax base, as long as we do it thoughtfully and on our own terms. I’d support a feasibility study about the benefits and drawbacks of increasing the tax levy, however I believe that decision belongs to the voters. Our town manager has been doing a great job of consolidating municipal services and sharing equipment with neighboring towns in order to save money, and I would continue to encourage that sort of collaboration.
Q: How will you make sure our town stays a nice place to live while also allowing new businesses or houses to be built?
A: I’ve been thinking a lot about this while watching the Planning Board meetings. Recently, the Planning Board has been creating zoning bylaws for section 40R construction, which lets them set building standards and design requirements for a new development that will bring new money from the State to help pay for schools and infrastructure. Basically, it’s a balancing act. Too many rules and it becomes cost prohibitive for a developer to actually build something. Too few, and builders can slap something in there that doesn’t fit with our town. I’ve been impressed with the Planning Board’s approach here. We have a variety of voices that are coming together to make sure that a new development would be appropriately sized, fit with our town’s aesthetic, avoid practical errors of execution, and be a nice place to live.
Sutton has been a “Tree city USA” recipient from the national Arbor Day Foundation for 26 years running. Maintaining the natural beauty of our town by preserving old growth trees during construction and requiring green space with new plantings when you build are examples of small actions we can take to keep Sutton looking green without being excessively burdensome to business owners and new families.
Q: Listening to People: If a lot of neighbors are angry about a new rule the board wants to pass, how will you make sure their voices are heard before you make a decision?
A: If a lot of people in town get wind of a Select Board issue and show up to public forum to speak, or reach out with letters and emails to share their views, that’s great! Whatever problems we face, we will always be better off when people get involved and care about issues of governance. This town is full of subject experts on everything from engineering and medicine to historical preservation and agriculture. Our board is much more likely to make informed decisions when we hear from the people impacted, and from people with special knowledge on the matter at hand. We are elected to use our best judgment and to be trustworthy, and we can do our best work with help from the public.
Q: Setting Priorities: Would you rather spend money on maintaining/fixing all the roads or maintaining the quality of our schools? Why?
A: Clearly both are important. I am a strong believer in the importance of education. Besides a moral conviction that we owe our children at least as many opportunities as we received, it also makes simple economic sense to keep our schools healthy. A strong school system attracts people to our town and keeps our property values high and our economy healthy. Well-educated high school graduates become thoughtful and capable neighbors.
When young people receive a good education, we all benefit. A few years from now, the students in our high school today will be our nurses, carpenters, leaders, caretakers, and policymakers, not to mention artists, writers, neighbors, and parents of the next generation. The better we prepare them, the better future we’ll all enjoy.
Everything I’ve said so far is true at any time, however I also think that we’re at a moment in history where education and critical thinking are more important than ever before. When I was in school, my teachers were very concerned about kids using Wikipedia as an information source. That almost seems quaint by today’s standards. Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine had to retract a clinical image that had been manipulated by generative AI. That technology is affecting what we see and read at every level of our society. Suddenly, you have to use high-level thinking every time you see a photo, and decide whether it’s real or AI-generated. That’s a new phenomenon, and it’s not easy. We need to equip the next generation to be very savvy about their information environment, and that’s not going to happen with large class sizes and bare-bones course offerings.
The school system takes up more than half of the town’s budget, and there is a lot of very important work that needs to be done with the rest. Fire, Police, Public Works, and the work done by our Council on Aging are all vital for the safety and well-being of our citizens. I don’t mind a few cracks in the road, but potholes and black ice are dangerous. We can’t think of our town budget as an either / or when it comes to public safety and amenities. Everyone who lives here contributes to the tax base, and everyone deserves to have a safe and dignified life in our town. When the schools are coming up against budget shortfalls, you can be sure that the other departments are as well. I want to see everyone who takes care of our community get the resources that they need to do their job well.
Q: Public Safety: What can the Select Board do to make sure our police, firefighters, and snowplow drivers have exactly what they need to keep us safe?
A: The select board and town manager have done a great job preparing and carrying out a long – term strategic plan to equip our Fire, Police, and Public Works departments with up-to-date equipment and good staffing levels. When so much care has been put into preparing a plan like this, the last thing you want to do is rock the boat, undermine the strategy, and create inefficiencies. I’d like to see the various department heads continue to get what they need and keep up the excellent work they do serving our community.
Q: Teamwork: Sometimes the Select Board members disagree on an issue. How will you work together to come to a compromise about a problem where everyone doesn’t agree?
A: I have three siblings, and my Mom ran a home daycare out of our house when I was growing up. To me, “plays well with others” has always been an imperative. Throughout my life and career, I’ve always been able to find a way to get along with people, even when we disagree. The role of selectman really calls for the ability to have productive and respectful discourse with people from your community who aren’t exactly like you. If everyone on the board has the exact same opinion on something, that means we’re definitely missing something. Without viewpoint diversity, we have blind spots that can get us into big trouble. That’s why public involvement is so important, and why it’s so important to have a mixed group of people on the Select Board who can have productive discourse from different views.
When it comes to disagreements, my strategy is simple: listen respectfully, understand the other person’s perspective, state my values clearly and firmly, and then try to build a consensus that we can all live with. You can stay true to your beliefs and values without getting bent out of shape when things don’t go your way, and you can understand and respect your colleague’s beliefs even when you don’t agree.
Q: Why do you want this position? What is your message to voters?
A: I view serving in this position as an act of public service. I know that this role will take up a lot of time, probably cause a considerable amount of stress, and I don’t expect to receive any personal benefit from it. I’m young and I have a lot to learn about governance, but I’m also not going anywhere. Given the opportunity, I could do a lot of good in service of this town over the next several decades. We all have a responsibility to serve our neighbors and to make our world a better place to live. We all have different talents to contribute. I don’t have the heavy equipment or training to take care of all of our hanging tree limbs, but I do have the ability to take in a lot of information, learn, and make thoughtful, fair, and honest decisions. I hope the good people of Sutton will give me the chance to do so.
