Here’s the video from the Newton League of Women Voters/NewTV forum featuring the three candidates running for the Ward 3 At-Large Alderman/City Council seat: Incumbents Ted Hess-Mahan and Jim Cote and challenger Julia Malakie.
Voters will have a chance to elect two of the three candidates. The city wide election will be held on Tuesday Nov. 3 (And, as always, thanks very much to NewTV for making this available to Village 14)
Watch the video then share your thoughts in the comments section.
Decision 2015: Aldermen at Large Ward Three from NewTV on Vimeo.
Nice debate
I think that both Julia Malakie and Jim Cote came across very well. They get the problems, and they connect to the community they live in.
Also, it’s clear that they are good listeners and would work well with other board members but stand up for the things they believe in.
No arrogance or condescension there!
It seems to me that Ted got it completely wrong on the impact of additional residential housing on the schools. You cannot just add more students and not have costs go up substantially.
Ted seems to think that we are living in a past era when there was plenty of spare capacity so you could just slot new students in and the fixed costs would not be affected.
The last override proves that is completely wrong. You have to add building capacity and add teachers.
More residential development will inevitable need to more overrides! And that for sure doesn’t do anything to keep the city affordable. Quite the opposite.
The giant push for more ‘affordable’ residential housing seems to be based on Ted’s misconception about the impact on the schools.
Any alderman needs to get this right. Both Jim and Julia do.
One further force pushing out low income residents is the knockdown of houses which provide relatively low rents, and their replacement by larger, expensive condos. Out go the lower income folks and in come the higher income residents. Jim and Julia are certainly your best bets to do the right thing on this issue!
OPEB is certainly the number one fiscal challenge for Newton but we will hamstring Newton’s ability to deal with that if we keep on this big push to increase the density of housing, bringing in more students which ultimately make our fiscal position worse and trigger tax increases, and if we keep on replacing our commercial properties with residential properties we diminish our commercially zoned assets ever further!
So it seems really clear that Jim Cote and Julia Malakie should be the voters first choice on election day.
Every board should be blessed to have such candidates with such great attitudes and such diverse backgrounds, who have a real handle on the problems at hand and will not trot out more of the same kind of planning (or lack of it!) which has gotten us into the financial hole we inhabit now.
What a pair!
As a small business owner with operations in Newton, also I know that they will keep fighting to improve Newton in ways which matters a great deal to me from a business perspective.
Residents in Newton should be very happy to support Jim and Julia!
Wow! A marine and a tree lover/photo journalist! What a great combination.
Overall, everyone did fine. The fact that Julia has an MBA from Chicago is a real plus.
Yes, Ted got the school cost thing wrong, but I think it even more wrong than it seems on the surface. A permanent change in the housing stock has a permanent impact on the long-run number of students. Thus, the average cost per student measures the cost impact. This is not a situation where marginal cost should be used, like overflow on a plane, since we don’t kick out new students if there is not enough room.
Why is it even more wrong than it seems on the surface? My understanding is that government accounting does not recognized depreciation on assets. So, when we measure average cost based on the NPS accounting, it does not measure real average cost–it does not include the opportunity cost of buildings and land. This inflates the real cost considerably.
I would like to change Ted’s version on the Mayor’s race and OPEB. In 2013 the election occurred right after Pine st Inn affordable housing incidemt. Ted claims that he was pushing OPEB the entire time…not true. My recollection was that Ted was all about affordable housing to a point where even people on this blog would say he was a one trick pony…what else do you stand for besides affordable housing? My issue was OPEB, it has been for 5-6 years. It wasn’t until I got eliminated that Ted took up OPEB for an issue for all of 5 weeks until the general election. So, to say that it was you who put pressure on the Mayor to do something on OPEB sounds silly to me. Matter of fact, I remember the Mayor having it as an issue in 2009 and maybe now he is just catching up to some of his promises. Ruthanne deserves a ton of credit for pushing the issue along all of this time, she’s been relentless, wrote reports, etc. For Ted to say he was the one to put pressure on the Mayor really minimalizes a lot of people’s efforts, especially when he was late to the party.
It seems that the biggest argument against housing is additional children in our schools.
Which seems to me a very negative and short-sighted view. The antithesis of the whole concept of public education. Who do we think should be paying to education the future generation? Student’s parents? Churches? Poorer communities like Revere?
It’s not like Newton is taking in thousands of starving war refugees. We are arguing over what – 20 additional students? We’re a rich, well educated community. We can help educate the next generation beyond our immediate bloodline.