Real Revenue Plan to Fully Fund Our Schools and City Services, Fix Our Streets, and Build a New Medford High School

Two years ago, I promised to pass the city’s first-ever Budget Ordinance, establish the Financial Task Force to deliver a real plan to invest in our public schools and city services, and take urgent action to raise revenue. I’m so proud to say that we accomplished each of those goals and our city and schools are better off because of our successful efforts.

But I know we’re all still fed up with broken streets and sidewalks, understaffed city services, and a beautiful Medford Public Library that doesn’t have the funding or staffing to stay open on Sundays. 

We still have a $200 million street and sidewalk repair backlog to address. We still need more code enforcement officers, health inspectors, and economic development planners. We still need to fix our water and sewer lines and build a new Fire Headquarters and new Medford High School. 

While the 2024 overrides stopped the bleeding of budget cuts and allowed for significant investments in our schools, Medford must enact and implement a real plan to raise revenue through smart and transformative new growth and development. That’s the work this Council has been focused on this term.

Now is the time for us to come together and move forward collaboratively to make the big decisions to fully fund the city budget and build a better future for Medford and all of its residents. 

Over the next two years, I look forward to: 

• Bringing together the city’s development planning and revenue planning processes to ensure that the city raises the revenue necessary to provide basic services through new growth of our commercial and mixed-use tax base
• Demanding clear plans and timelines from the Mayor and City Administration for when and how we will fix our streets, update our water and sewer lines, and restore our public buildings by using the transparent budget process created by the new Budget Ordinance
• Working with residents, families, the Mayor as part of the Financial Task Force, and the Medford High School Building Committee to outline a plan to fund the construction of a new Medford High School with significant state funds from the Massachusetts School Building Authority

Transformative Growth Policies to Build More Affordable Housing and Vibrant Business Districts

My top reason for running for City Council in 2019 was housing affordability and preventing displacement. Six years later, I still haven’t found a way to buy a home in the city I love, and I’ve seen even more friends and neighbors forced to leave the city they love because of skyrocketing housing costs. We need to make sure Medford stays affordable for people who want to stay here, and is affordable enough to welcome in new neighbors regardless of income. 

Updated zoning provisions and city ordinances we passed over the past two terms are starting to help, but we need to kick our work into overdrive and put Medford at the leading edge of regional and statewide efforts to provide housing for all.

Over the next two years, I look forward to:

• Passing transformative updates to the Zoning Ordinance to build more housing that fits our residential neighborhoods and revitalize our squares and business districts through expanded mixed-use and commercial development
• Climate-focused city planning (including passing the new Green Building Code) and making streets, sidewalks, and open spaces more walkable, bikeable, and accessible for people using all forms of mobility devices
• Encouraging smart economic development that brings in new commercial and mixed-use projects on vacant or underutilized land in the city

Thousands of Medford residents have been part of the collaborative project over the past six years to create a solid plan for the city’s growth and development and finally update the city’s broken, outdated zoning.

Updating our zoning is key for three reasons: 

1. Medford needs to encourage significant and smart new commercial and residential development to grow our tax base and fund our city services and schools. All of our city’s planning documents and budget processes make this reality clear.
2. Our current patchwork zoning enables and incentivizes developers to maximize their profits and doesn’t protect our city’s climate and open space goals. New and proposed zoning updates include performance standards, design standards, open space requirements, and other requirements. These ensure that Medford receives significant community benefits as we experience the inevitable development that will happen no matter what due to the skyrocketing value of land and property in Medford.
3. Medford and our region are part of a housing crisis caused by not having enough housing for everyone who wants to stay here or move here. Every study, both local and national, shows that building new housing is the best way to help keep the housing we already have more affordable and slow down price increases that are making it impossible to live here and driving displacement of our neighbors. The Council and planning team have proposed focusing the biggest potential change and growth in our commercial squares and mixed-use corridors, while allowing for the possibility of 1-2 more units than is currently possible on lots in many of our residential neighborhoods, which is what our city’s planning documents recommend.

The work over the past six years first resulted in the 2022 Zoning Recodification that passed unanimously and has brought smart, responsible new developments to Medford and helped support new small businesses and expanded nightlife with later operating hours. 

From 2021 to 2023, the Mayor, City Council, and planning staff worked alongside thousands of residents to develop our 2023 Comprehensive Plan, which outlines a 30 year vision for growth and change in our city that allows us to improve our community and preserve what we love about Medford now. This plan included a number of recommendations to update our zoning ordinances.

In December 2023, the Council voted to accept a proposal for the next phase of this work through a Zoning Updates Project that outlined an 18-month, $150,000 contract with a zoning consultant team for citywide rezoning to implement the recommendations of our Comprehensive Plan, Climate Action Plan, Housing Production Plan, and decades of studies that sat on the shelf because the city did not act. This phase of the project has been a partnership between the City Council, Mayor’s administration, and planning staff and has engaged thousands of residents across over 50 public meetings.

I’m proud to say that this resulted in the passage of Mystic Avenue rezoning in 2024 to activate a long underutilized and ignored area of the city as well as updates to the Salem Street zoning to allow for smart mixed-use development and growth in a key business and commercial area of the city. We also passed the Green Score zoning provision to ensure that big new developments are meeting our city’s environmental and climate goals and adding significant trees and green space to the current seas of pavement we currently see in commercial areas.

As the Zoning Updates Project continued, it became clear that the Mayor needed to provide more funding and resources for public engagement and extend the contract, which Council VIce President Collins and other councilors began advocating for in 2024. While some additional resources helped us reach more residents, including receiving statewide recognition from the Mass Municipal Association for our extensive communications efforts, I began working with city staff on a contract extension this spring and formally outlined my request for an extended process for this project in July 2025. 

I am hopeful that the Mayor will agree to provide the funding and resources to extend the contract for this project for the next two years through 2027 so that we can all work together to complete the essential and necessary work to update the zoning for our squares and corridors and review proposals to update residential zoning to implement our city’s plans and achieve our shared goals. 

More Inclusive, Accessible, and Democratic City Government

I have been incredibly active in expanding transparency and communications between the City Council and residents. In my first and second term, I fought for and secured hybrid meetings during the pandemic, the city’s first-ever translation services line-item to translate materials into multiple languages, a redesign of the city website, consistent outreach to local and state media outlets (including significant coverage of the FY23 city budget debacle through my data analysis and presentations to the community) and provided regular updates to residents on my website, email, and digital outreach. 

During the 2024-2025 term, the City Council has further expanded our engagement with residents. The Council initiated a process and published the first ever Governing Agenda to outline our goals and what we would be working on for the full two-year term – no other City Council in Massachusetts has a more clear and transparent planning document like this. We updated the Committee structure to create clear policy areas and hold dozens more meetings than previous Councils to address substantive issues. In partnership with my fellow councilors, the Council established and published a monthly newsletter, began streaming all meetings live on YouTube, and set monthly listening sessions in the community to hear from our neighbors.

We’ll continue supporting initiatives like our resilience hubs and community liaisons program that bring historically excluded residents and communities into city government and bring the work of city government out into the whole community. 

Medford needs to dedicate more funding to increase public engagement and collaboration with residents and expand great initiatives like the community liaisons program. Even more importantly, we need real structural changes to our City Charter, ordinances, and daily practices to make city government more inclusive and more democratic. 

Over the next two years, I look forward to:

• Demanding major updates to our city’s digital infrastructure and website so residents can easily access city services and find key information and metrics about our city budget and the performance of our city departments
• Increasing funding for community engagement and outreach to engage more residents in the collaborative work of local government 
• Advocating for more resources to expand Medford’s community liaisons program and support the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Implementing the proposed new city charter if it passes in November and advocate for the passage of meaningful checks and balances into the structure of city government in future charter review processes 
• Ensuring that Mayor-appointed city boards and commissions are more representative of the racial and economic diversity of our community