Melrose Election 2023: My Thoughts
How I'm thinking about next week's ballot, and why.
On Tuesday, November 7th, Melrose residents will head to the polls for a hugely impactful local election. If you haven’t made plans on voting yet, please do! Voters will decide on the city’s next mayor, its entire city council, and half the school committee. We will also be asked to approve a $130M+ debt exclusion for the construction of three new fire stations and a new police station.
I’ve written up my thoughts on each of these categories below. The debt exclusion is the most consequential spending decision this city has faced in decades, and after a 2021 election in which all eleven city council seats were uncontested, this go-around features twelve(!) first-time candidates.
The below represents my opinions and mine alone, through my lens as a resident particularly focused on smart growth and sustainability. These races are not popularity contests, and you should not simply vote for the people you like the best. Everything below represents my personal assessment of these individuals as candidates in this election. I’m not making judgments on who they are as people, or as members of the community. They’ve all dedicated their time and energy to Melrose, and are all signaling an interest in doing more. I commend them for their efforts, and so should you. But at the end of the day, you have to pick some and eliminate others, and I’ve done my best to be fair and honest in my assessments based strictly on their campaigns, past performance in office, and in some cases, their prior activism or advocacy in the community.
Mayor
Your vote for mayor should be for Jen Grigoraitis. Grigoraitis, the current City Council president (representing Ward 6), ran what was by far the most policy-based campaign of the three mayoral candidates this year. She has pledged to make Melrose a Vision Zero community, pilot a curbside composting program, and actually budget for street trees. She’s also stated she will pursue the hiring of a transportation planner, and will work regionally to bring in funding under the Inflation Reduction Act. The strength and specificity of a candidate’s policy platform is, in my opinion, the primary thing he or she should be judged on. Jen’s has been the best, and that’s why she continues to have my support. It’s as simple as that.
One other point I’m particularly passionate about here is that, as City Council president, Grigoraitis has done more than probably any other public figure in the city over the past four years to promote public access to the process of governing. Last year, the council formally added a requirement for remote access “wherever practicable” to their rules of order. I believe they are the only public body in the city to have made such a commitment. If you want to go down to city hall and comment on a matter before the council, you can do that. If you have to, like, do the dishes and put your kids to bed, but you still want to comment on a matter before the council, you can do that also, on your smartphone, while listening to the proceedings.
This is a big deal! They did not have to do this, and most public bodies (in Melrose and elsewhere) have either returned to full in-person meetings or have maintained virtual simulcasting without the opportunity for remote public comment. I can’t say enough good things about the way the Council does this, with support from MMTV and their Clerk of Committees Andrew Ghobrial and City Clerk Kristin Foote. The Council has also preserved the option to hold fully remote hearings in instances where scheduling makes an in-person quorum impossible — again, a positive sign for residents who want to see local government actually doing things. In a city where people love to complain about process and transparency and communication, it is demonstrably true that Grigoraitis has used her position on the council to make government more accessible.
The other candidate, Monica Medeiros, has given a lot of her time and energy to this community over the years, and we’re better for it. She is a positive campaigner who is clearly dedicated to this city. But she frankly does not have a very concrete platform, and has campaigned largely on fiscally-conservative vagaries about responsible budgeting and, you know, making sure the trash continues to get picked up. While the city’s elections are officially nonpartisan, we all know that parties usually play a role in who we decide to vote for. I’m a Democrat and Medeiros is a Republican, so yes, she would have had to propose some very forward-thinking municipal policies to really interest me. She could have! Pedestrianize Essex Street or something, and I will vote for you! Alas, she has not. In prior election cycles, she’s used her local platform to endorse not only Trump-backed Geoff Diehl but also 2020 MAGA election truther Caroline Colarusso as they have sought public office.
City Council
When you’re considering who to vote for on the city council, you have to start with some kind of model of what it is that a city councilor in Melrose actually does. In my model, these folks have three basic functions, in order of importance:
Approve spending requests and board appointments. City departments routinely draw on various accounts for funding requests outside of the annual budget cycle, and any such appropriations must be approved by the council. Similarly, members of multi-member appointive bodies, from the Planning Board to the Cemetery Commission, must all be reviewed and approved by the council. They also review the annual city budget, but they honestly have little ability to influence it.
Get information from the mayor and city staff. The city charter gives the council relatively broad powers to require city staff to appear before it on matters which are “within the jurisdiction of the city council.” They can also require the mayor to appear to provide information on “any aspect of the business of the city.” For example, the council recently held a hearing on the status of the library project, because the public hadn’t received one recently. The Planning Director shared that the project was a little delayed because contractors had discovered an entire house buried under the parking lot, which the city needed to have hauled off to Ohio for asbestos disposal. Helpful stuff!
Represent the city well. It’s good to have councilors who are engaged with the community at different levels, who share a bunch of positive stuff in their newsletters, etc. It’s also helpful to have someone you can call, or email, on basically anything having to do with the city. A councilor may not be able to solve your problem, but he or she can possibly help point you in the right direction or get your issue some attention, and this is nice for residents.
Yes, they are the legislative branch of our city, and they could spend a lot of their time, like, passing new ordinances. But that’s hard work, and the stipend for being a councilor is $4,000 annually, pre-tax. There’s just not a lot of incentive to do extra credit policy work, and it mostly doesn’t happen. Almost any new ordinance request will actually come through the mayor’s office.
With respect to how the city runs, the actual business of being a councilor consists almost entirely of point number one. This is where I recommend you spend most of your time as a voter: what sorts of city initiatives will they vote for, and what will they vote against? The rule of thumb is that a supermajority of eight councilors is required to approve any appropriation or ordinance (some zoning changes can pass with six). Hence I recommend that you view each candidate for city council in the context of the makeup of the council. If you are voting for Grigoraitis, you probably want a council that will generally either work to support her endeavors or will in fact push her to do more.
Before discussing the at-large race, I’ll provide a general ward-level summary. The majority of votes the council takes are pretty non-controversial, so I’ll discuss these candidates by their likelihood to support something Grigoraitis wants to do that might ruffle some more conservative-leaning feathers. The best recent litmus test I can think of would be Brodeur’s request that the city adopt a Housing Production Plan. Adopting a Housing Production Plan can help communities ward off 40B developments, so you’d think it would be universally embraced regardless of political leanings. But in adopting a plan, you have to say that your community needs more housing. Many conservatives just cannot bring themselves to say this! Indeed, even though the plan marginally improves Melrose’s ability to oppose 40B developments, councilors Garipay, Obremski, Stewart, and Cinella all found reason to vote no on it. That’s the sort of “philosophical divide” I kept in mind while marking my assessments on the candidates below.
The ward candidates are —
Ward One: Manjula Karamcheti is unopposed. She is generally a reliable progressive vote on the council. That’s 1-0 so far.
Ward Two: Incumbent John Obremski was endorsed by the Melrose Dems and will probably win his reelection, but he is both fairly inscrutable and chronically absent. His attendance record of just 68% (per city records) is the worst on the council by far, and when he does attend, he rarely expresses opinions or asks questions. His opponent, Jeffrey Michael McCarthy, hilariously admitted to Patch that he only ran because he never heard back from Obremski when he asked if the seat would be open. I would consider him a toss-up, leaning Democrat, but there’s not a ton to go on even after two years of him being on the council. Again, he voted against the Housing Production Plan. Let’s call the current split 1.5-0.5.
Ward Three: Robb Stewart is running unopposed. He’s center-conservative, especially on fiscal matters, and holds a more traditionalist suburban view of the city than others on the council. He’s no radical, but on split votes, he often sides with the more conservative councilors. We’re even at 1.5-1.5.
Ward Four: Mark Garipay is running unopposed. Garipay also tends to join the conservative bloc for split votes, a group he and Stewart will anchor on this upcoming council. We’re at 1.5-2.5.
Ward Five: Kim Vandiver, a first-time candidate, runs unopposed. Kim seems great! Very focused on issues that I care about. I’ll look for her to try and drive engagement in Ward five generally, which was remapped after the last census to rely heavily on the Smart Growth District around Oak Grove. This seat ultimately should draw from those neighborhoods, but Kim will be an asset to the Council. We’re at 2.5-2.5.
Ward Six: This is the only true ward-level race, and you could tell a very simply story about it, which is that it features a “new Melrose” candidate (Barb Travers) and an “old Melrose” candidate (Cal Finocchiaro). I am sure both would dispute this characterization as unhelpful, but to me it is essentially correct. Travers has run a much more issues-focused campaign. When Finocchiaro called out sick from the LWV forum, which prevented Travers from participating, Travers uploaded her answers to her website (Finocchiaro has not). Travers has my endorsement here. Finocchiaro is a great champion for youth sports and local businesses, and very active in the community. But by all appearances, she is mostly focused on what she perceives as problems of communication, transparency, and long-time residents feeling left out. She advocated for a “better process” in the Red Raider debate, and in a similar vein, spearheaded the local media campaign that ultimately got Superintendent Kukenberger mocked on Kimmel. She’s expressed regret about the latter episode, but why take the risk? Her Patch profile says she supports “progress” on affordable housing “while making sure the properties make sense for the surrounding residents.” I don’t love it! This strikes me as a competitive race that will be decided based on turnout, though the internal politics of ward six are beyond my grasp (Finocchiaro held a campaign event for Grigoraitis last election cycle). We’re projecting it at 3-3.
Ward Seven: Devin Romanul, another first-time candidate, runs unopposed. I draw a lot of similarities between him and Vandiver in terms of both my impressions of them as candidates and my expectations for their performance on the Council. I’ve talked with Devin numerous times and generally walk away with the impression that he is aligned with me on a lot of issues. Big fan! That’s 4-3.
So the expectation here is that you’re crossing your fingers to get 4 progressive votes from the ward councilors. If you need eight to pass something, that means all of your at-large candidates need to be reliable. I’d say your chief heuristic in the at-large race should be how often will this person vote alongside Karamcheti/Vandiver/Romanul.
My at-large votes will be as below. Three of the four are incumbents, and my views on the incumbents are very heavily informed by a pretty detailed knowledge of both their voting record and their public statements about issues that matter to me. I frankly have not paid that much attention to the campaigns of the at-large incumbents because there’s already a substantial body of work to judge them on, and I view their candidacies as a continuation of what they’re already about.
Leila Migliorelli: I expect that Leila will be the top council vote-getter. Her ability to support forward-thinking policies while avoiding controversy is an asset to the council. I also think she’s the natural choice to serve as council president (assuming she wants it). When the mayor’s office wanted to establish an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, it was Migliorelli who co-sponsored with Grigoraitis. She’s a good, smart, serious councilor who deserves the widespread support.
Maya Jamaleddine: The city has been, I think, relatively earnest in recent years about trying to shed its image as a place that can be hostile or unwelcoming to new arrivals. I don’t know how much actual progress we’ve made, but if you’re going to make progress, you need elected officials for whom this is a focus. This is undoubtedly Maya’s focus, and she has no problem challenging orthodoxy to get there. The community would be wise to re-elect her.
Ryan Williams: Ryan is not listed as an incumbent on the ballot, but he’s the current ward seven city councilor, and is running at-large after moving to ward three during the campaign. In my view, the two themes he’s most consistently (and loudly) championed are sustainability and public education, and I think he’s genuinely committed to pushing the ball forward on the city’s path to net zero while also keeping the discussion rooted in on-the-ground impacts. Ryan explains his reasoning for just about every vote he takes, so again, you will never have to wonder about transparency with him. I will disclose that Ryan’s a good friend of mine, but I would vote for him regardless, because he supports the issues that I care about.
Ed O’Connell: Ed currently sits on the School Committee, and has not done a great deal of campaigning, so I had some reservations about the substance here. But he’s garnered the endorsement of the Melrose Dems, and in all the forums I’ve seen him in, he’s been a pretty clear and direct speaker in favor of better school funding and a need to move the community forward. None of his messaging has raised any red flags for me. There is also, I think, a growing desire for the council to not necessarily have more oversight of the school committee budget, but perhaps to possess more knowledge of it. I get the impression O’Connell can, and will, help with that in ways that Obremski, who was a former school committee member himself, has not. O'Connell is the best choice for the fourth at-large slot.
Below are the candidates I am not voting for, and why I chose not to vote for them. I will list them in alphabetical order. Why are there so many at-large folks in this year’s race? I don’t really know. Again, there’s an easy story you could tell yourself, which is that something about the past few years has made certain residents feel aggrieved or left out. It’s better to have more candidates! But for some of these folks, there’s a real lack of clarity on a) the specific policies or priorities of the Brodeur administration they disagree with, or b) the specific policies or priorities they think Melrose does not follow, but should. Voters should generally expect specifics, and if they don’t get them, they should be wary.
Maria Berardi: Berardi has been advocating for the past few years about rats. I think she feels that the city has not been responsive enough to her complaints about rodents, and so she’s putting her money where her mouth is and doing something about it: running for office. This is, you know, exactly what citizens are supposed to do, and I tip my cap to her for running. I genuinely feel that her activism got the city’s Health Department to pay more attention to areas of active rat colonies. But ultimately, I judge there to be a relatively conservative set of messages here overall. I would steer clear.
Ward Hamilton: A lot of the support letters you’ll see about Hamilton call him a sort of unique character who listens and engages on a wide variety of subjects. He does indeed like to engage and listen. A couple of years ago I published an editorial about adopting the Community Preservation Act, and Ward reached out to me to discuss the idea and signal his support. I appreciated it a lot! I do discuss city policies and projects with him from time to time, and I do enjoy it, whether we agree or disagree. He would probably be pretty good on points two and three above. But it’s point number one that makes him a “no” vote from me. Hamilton was a key architect of the very, very extra response to retiring the “Red Raider” nickname, including the efforts to put it to a ballot question. There were FOIAs over this, and accusations that the school committee and administration were illicitly in cahoots. It was all, you know, perfectly well and fine from a process standpoint, but it’s an understatement to say that I considered it a distraction and frankly mostly a waste of time. As chair of the city’s Historical commission, Hamilton came close to getting a Demolition Delay Ordinance — a local rule which would trigger an automatic delay period any time a building over a certain age was proposed to be demolished — in front of the council. I suspect he’d use his position as councilor to advance that goal again, risking adding further delays to an already complex review process to get any new growth in this city. These are simply honest disagreements on policy priorities for the city, and I have too many reservations that he would use his political capital in ways that I’d find counterproductive.
Michael Lyle: Lyle took his mandatory retirement from a career in the Melrose Police Department at the end of 2022, having served as chief for well over a decade. I don’t really get a clear picture of why he’s running, but I think a lot of his positioning is based on his reputation as the former police chief. He doesn’t appear to have filled out a candidate questionnaire for Patch, and his website is all vagaries. In my interactions with him he has never been anything but polite and cordial. I will note that in his position on the traffic commission, he voted against both the lower Main Street bike lanes and the parklet outside of Bohemian café. I deduct points there. I’m sure he’ll continue to be a visible and appreciated figure in the community but I don’t see any reason why it should be on the city council.
John Orlandella: I don’t know, he seems like a nice guy. In his Patch profile, he says that in the recent past, “not every decision has been made for the community at large” and that there is a divide between “those who loved Melrose's past” and those who want “something else.” Again, if you are not willing to be specific about what exactly you mean when you say this sort of stuff, I’m assuming there’s something fishy going on. I’ll pass.
Chris Sullivan: Sullivan has run the most policy-focused campaign in the city council race, and that policy is blocking and stymying new growth in the city. I certainly commend him for his transparency. Twenty years ago, Sullivan sued the city’s planning board over its approvals of the Windsor at Oak Grove mixed-use project. Why? Because of his prediction that the development, sited on the Malden border next to Oak Grove station, would “sink” Melrose, hurting local home values while negatively impacting the city’s budget. These predictions turned out completely wrong. Melrose home values have since skyrocketed; the development is by far the city’s single-biggest taxpayer, generating over $1M annually for the budget; the property provides retail space for numerous beloved small businesses like Hinge Fitness, Ocean Sushi, Step 1 Childcare, and Jitters Cafe; and, as anyone who’s spent time near the project can attest, it generates an unremarkable amount of vehicle trips. According to MassDOT statistics, in the past ten years there have been a grand total of three crashes at the development’s intersection with Main Street.
Alas, now that housing development in Massachusetts is front-page news, the old NIMBY hobbyhorse is getting pulled back out of the closet. It’s just as wrong today as it was back then. Sullivan’s group filed its lawsuit over the Oak Grove project in 2002, and settled in 2004. This had very real consequences for the budget, since it deferred the city’s ability to collect substantial new taxes on the property. Indeed, at the same time as the case was being settled, Melrose was forced to shut down two of the city’s three fire stations and furlough firefighters because it could not afford to pay them. Perhaps this sort of nonsense from the city’s past is your vision of Melrose’s future. It’s not mine.
Paul Schille: Schille is probably the candidate that has the least material available online. I don’t think he did the MMTV candidate statements, or the Patch profiles. By all accounts he’s quite conservative. I see him in campaign standouts with Medeiros a lot. I’ll pass.
School Committee
There are four candidates running for three slots and Driscoll is the only incumbent. Departing are Liz Deselm and Ed O’Connell. School Committee is a tough assignment; these folks are not compensated, and they have fewer obvious tools with which they can proactively monitor and audit what’s happening with the schools. We all know by now that the district, under Superintendent Kukenberger, simply was not paying close enough attention to cost overruns last year, or to its administration of grant funds within the budget. The choice for School Committee is particularly difficult this year because the city is currently operating with an interim Superintendent.
I think all four candidates seem strong. Matt Hartman and Seamus Kelley are the two I’m most familiar with; Hartman was involved in the override campaign, which I voted in favor of, and Kelley is also clearly of the opinion that the district needs more resources. They’ll get my vote. Trzepacz’s website says the district deals with “chronic underfunding” as well. He does not seem to have much direct experience — but that could be seen equally as a benefit or a drawback. Driscoll, the incumbent, is the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials, a 501c3 working to “enhance the competence and knowledge of financial and operational professionals in public schools throughout the Commonwealth.” Both seem passionate about public schools and genuine in their interest. I hesitate to recommend a third vote. If you think the committee needs someone new, vote for Trzepacz. If you think experience is critical, Driscoll is clearly the choice.
Debt Exclusion
I have written two previous articles on this subject, the first detailing the the city’s history of ignoring the issue, and the second exploring the menu of practical options we have to address it. In the second article, I predicted the council would adopt Mayor Brodeur’s less-costly $95M plan to only renovate three of the four stations. This was very wrong! Councilor Cinella motioned almost immediately to place the full $130M question on the ballot; only a single councilor, Jack Eccles, was willing to advocate for a cheaper plan. In the end, the Council voted 10-0 to support the full option, with surprisingly little debate (Councilor Jamaleddine was absent).
I won’t spend a lot of time rehashing the history of this. A “yes” vote will grant the city permission to breach the prop 2.5 limits in order to build these stations; the actual borrowing requests would still be subject to city council approval, and those requests will be sequenced as required by the construction schedule. Should the question pass, the next council will very likely be the decisionmakers on the new police and Tremont Street stations, but anything beyond that is difficult to project. A “no” vote would basically mean the next mayor will have to move quickly to put together a smaller plan — either the one Brodeur originally proposed, or perhaps something different entirely.
There are genuinely valid viewpoints on both sides of this question. The most compelling reason to vote “yes” is that it would likely put this issue to bed for the next 40 years or so. We’ve delayed before, and all we’ve gotten for our troubles is a higher price tag. It’s not flashy, it’s not glamorous, but we need public safety buildings. The perfect is the enemy of the good. A “yes” vote doesn’t lock us into any particular plan, but does set us on the path to executing all four buildings. The most compelling reason to vote “no” is that the project sure does seem big and capital-intensive for a community of Melrose’s size. Nobody likes the location for the new police station, and the Public Safety Building Committee presented no actual data as to why a city of Melrose’s size needs three full-sized fire stations. Here’s a quiz: what percentage of calls to fire departments would you guess are for actual fires? The answer is just three and a half percent. Are we optimizing for EMS response in twenty-first century Melrose? It’s hardly obvious. Melrose chronically struggles to afford to maintain the infrastructure we already have. We should exercise great caution in choosing to add more. A “no” vote would not plunge the city into chaos; a new plan would be proposed, and a special election would be held to vote on it.
The city estimates my tax bill will go up $70 a month to fund these stations. Think hard about this question, and go with your priority.
GO VOTE!
Well done.
I always appreciate your perspective and have enjoyed our conversations over the years. Thank you for sharing.