I am endorsing the following City Council candidates – Rena Getz, Alan Lobovits, Lisa Gordon, Randy Block, Stephen Farrell, and David Micley.
I am doing this because of the current City Council’s failure to examine, much less resist, Mayor Fuller’s plan to rezone Newton. If her plan goes through, there will be two financial classes in Newton. One class will own everything and send their children to private schools, while the other class will own nothing and send their children to increasingly dysfunctional public schools.
This is shown by the current VCOD rezoning proposal that ostensibly produces the rezoning required to satisfy the MTBA Communities Law. The Mayor’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood is home to the MBTA T station closest to Boston. Chestnut Hill is totally eligible for the multi-family upzoning required by the MBTA law and is precisely the type of low-density neighborhood close to public transportation that the law is supposed to “fix.” Chestnut Hill was left out of the VCOD rezoning, however, without a single protest from the majority City Council faction. Meanwhile, the highly dense Nonantum, full of families and thriving small businesses, is being upzoned with multi-story buildings that require no parking. This is occurring despite the fact that Nonantum has no train or subway, meaning that Nonantum’s upzoning will NOT count towards the MBTA Law. Who didn’t protest the upzoning of a neighborhood that is already providing exactly the kind of affordable high-density housing that the MBTA Law is supposed to provide? The majority of the City Council, that’s who. Instead, this majority is trying to put as many buildings as possible (with few parking requirements) into the densest sections of Newton, while leaving the least dense sections alone. This unthinking majority will only be changed by electing the candidates that I am endorsing.
Debra Waller
Waban
