Village 14 is inviting all candidates for mayor, city council or school committee to submit a single guest column between now and Aug 1.
My name is Jake Auchincloss and I ask for your vote to re-elect me as city councilor-at-large from Ward 2.
In an era of national political instability, you deserve local officials who are making sound decisions about the issues that directly affect your life: education, infrastructure, housing, and taxation. You deserve judgment that you can trust.
Why should you trust my judgment? Three reasons:
I make decisions empirically, not emotionally
- Example: Road quality in Newton is poor. Every constituent (my own fiancé included) is convinced that their road is the worst in Newton and should be paved first. The city has partnered with a technology company, however, to prioritize every segment of road in the city according to its pavement condition and its intensity of use. As the city accelerates road pavement, I have – and will continue to – demand adherence to this data-driven schedule instead of angling for exceptions for the most vocal residents.
- Example: The Welcoming City ordinance, which I co-docketed, aroused tremendous passion in opposition. The facts indicated, though, that the measure is Constitutional with a track record of improving police-community relations.
I make decisions regardless of political headwinds
- Example: My vote in favor of Washington Place, in my home ward, earned me a challenger who is opposed to housing. But Newton needs more walkable, affordable housing and I will continue to support projects that provide it.
- Example: I defended the right of Newton North students to display the Confederate Flag. Nobody wants to associate themselves with such behavior, but the First Amendment is most important when it’s least popular.
I understand and share Newton’s values and priorities
- Example: I was educated in Newton from Temple Emanuel pre-K through Newton North. I know that world-class education is the cardinal value in Newton and I will always support the public schools, through thick and thin.
- Example: Through my monthly newsletter and office hours, which build upon the 14K doors that my campaign knocked last cycle, I am constantly internalizing my constituents’ priorities. Not just the priorities of the most vocal residents – the truly representative concerns that more quietly pervade this city.
Perhaps most distressingly, I know that there are thousands of seniors out there in our city who are struggling – with dignity, with grace – but struggling to afford to stay in the city where they raised their kids and built their lives. The accessory apartment ordinance will help, but we need to do more to make housing affordable for them. My opponent would vote to go in reverse; I will work for progress.
Please email me at [email protected] or attend my monthly office hours (first Saturday of every month, 10AM – noon at L’Aroma Cafe) to talk more.
Onwards,
Jake
Without talking about the substance, I will say that I see Jake everywhere. Either we have the same taste in food, or he is around Newton more than the average city councilor.
On a side note, who has declared in Ward 2?
@ Jake
I’d like to hear you respond to concerns that all Ward 2 representatives– you, Susan and Emily– failed the Cabot School community when leadership was needed a year ago. The specific concern isn’t that different people had different perspectives and priorities– but that we were unable to manage/address those concerns while sticking to the original timelines. We’re stuck with an unnecessary additional six months at Carr, which could have been avoided with more effective leadership by you and your colleagues. As a result, our kids will be stuck on buses for hundreds of wasted hours shuttling them through the city because we were unable to manage the process better.
I still don’t understand why months elapsed without addressing these concerns. Feels a lot like the kid who left their homework until the last minute and then complains there wasn’t enough time. There was ample time to address all issues, and the kids are the ones who realize the cost now. Not good leadership, IMO.
No amount of time has been added to expected completion date of Cabot in September of 2019. That was the expected completion before any controversy arose. I’m not sure where this misconception comes from.
Respectfully – I don’t think you took a strong position on the messy situation that arose with the Cabot project last spring (which comes with both positive and negative implications), but the insistence – first by Emily Norton and now here by you – that there was no delay is factually incorrect. I’d rather not going searching through the meeting notes again to prove it, but this project was scheduled to take 18 months until the “pause” made that impossible, and at that time the city and the committee decided 2 years was acceptable and in some ways more convenient. At no point prior to the vote to delay was there any agreement to extend past December/January 2019.
Exactly what Joanna said. The “pause” to re-evaluate options was precisely when the project was delayed six months to September 2019.
The project was announced as a January 2019 start for Cabot, not September.
You seriously don’t know when the largest facility project in your own Ward was supposed to be completed?
That’s “local” representation?
Jake, thanks for posting. In this time of a proliferation of purely idealogical and emotional decision making, its good to see a councilor who understands that in a representative democracy an elected’s job is to use sound judgement not try to make every constituent happy. The former makes for well thought out factual conclusions while the later just ends in chaos.
The thing is, making sound decisions does require a dab of emotion, knowledge of and support of policies before agreements are made (custodians,) and knowing the facts. It’s not possible to stay on top of all issues in the city, so councilors will have their own specific interests but those can’t preclude having adequate knowledge of issues in Ward 2 and their progress. Councilors Norton and Albright were closely involved in the Cabot School process but surely you were kept in the loop.
http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/64973
Projected Milestone Schedule
Construction Phase: January 2019 Cabot School Opens
It’s disappointing that you spout talking points as facts to join Emily Norton in rewriting the history of the process and instead claim there has been a misunderstanding by your constituents.
Why?
Paul, while I agree with your comments on the delay of Cabot School’s opening, I don’t understand why you end with “That’s “local” representation?”
If in fact you are referring to the elimination of ward-elected councilors and having only councilors-at-large with residency requirements in the proposed charter, it was the ward-elected councilor Emily Norton, and the other Ward 2 at-large- councilor Susan Albright who were involved. It was also Emily Norton who first stated as fact that there was/is no delay in Cabot’s opening.
Complaining of lack of representation in this case makes no sense.
I was present in the discussions that culminated with “the pause” and the decision to change the move-in date to September 2019.
The pause happened when the project teams realized that the design impacts on the building layout of the Potter property acquisition hadn’t been fully vetted. We didn’t want to pause but we weighed the pause duration (6 weeks) against getting the design right for the building lifetime (75 years). And this mattered too: We heard from many councilors that they would not vote for site plan approval until this vetting happened.
Now consider these project timelines:
Angier was planned for 18 months, from June 2014 through December 2015. This was ambitious but doable and allowed Zervas to move into Carr swing space on time. Downside – the punchlist work continued for the first year that Angier students reoccupied the building.
Zervas was planned for 21 months, from December 2015 through August of 2017. An 18-month timeline might have been a stretch (a squeeze?), but adding the summer months gave breathing room for pile and other site work and will hopefully allow the contractor to get through the punch list before students arrive this fall.
Cabot – Early on, project planners hoped that the Cabot project would run from June 2017 through December of 2018. But Cabot is the largest, and is complicated by the preservation of the 1929 building and the reconstruction of the culvert that runs through the site. Many of us felt that the 18-month Cabot schedule was both extremely ambitious and unrealistic, but group acknowledgment of this did not happen until we were discussing the pause.
Based on what we learned from Angier and Zervas, I believe that Cabot would have always opened in September 2019 (the timeline in the doc Marti linked to was written in January 2015, when the Angier project was just building up steam). Feel free to complain about whether Jake, Emily and Susan could have managed community engagement and feelings differently, but they are not responsible for the current timeline and could not have helped the project to an earlier completion date. I think this timeline and start date:
• Were always realistic
• Allowed for an inconsequential 6 week pause to vet an outstanding design consideration
• Would avoid an extremely disruptive mid-year move for Cabot students. We did it for the Angier/Zervas move and could do it again, but we learned after Angier/Zervas that we should avoid this if possible
• As an aside, NPS did not need the Carr swing space until September 2019 so keeping the Cabot students at Carr through June 2019 had no impact on other school projects.
Regards, Steve
Steve, yes my link is to the original opening date of January 2019 – that’s the point.
The opening date was changed from the original date to September 2019 regardless of why. Two councilors have stated that their was no change in the opening date. Thus my posting of a fact to show a change was made.
Got it!
@Steve
Wow– clearest explanation I’ve heard about the whole thing. Thank you. I’d suggest that the Potter property acquisition had been agreed to six months earlier, the prior November, and rumblings started then that it changed the whole equation for the Cabot site. It could and should have been addressed earlier.
You provide a few reasons why the Sept 2019 start would have happened anyways– perhaps these were understandings that were not in anyway communicated to the Cabot community– until the point of the six-week pause. Color me a bit skeptical, I haven’t heard about the challenges of mid-year Angier move, by accounts I’ve heard it went well. But perhaps true.
As Marti said, the largest concern is that our Ward 2 reps seems to be a bit loose with the facts. You’ve provided a pretty complete account here, where, while I may not agree with everything, I fully understand your thinking and it aligns with the facts.
@Jake-
Read and learn how its done.
@Marti
“Local” is an adjective that Jake is using as part of his campaign, read his post here again, and he similarly emphasizes it in his mailer if you’ve received it. “Local” not so important when your representative is not able to provide a factually accurate accounting of events that are important to his/her Ward. The comment had nothing to do with the at-large/ward only debate. (Although one can speculate why Jake thought “local” was an important attribute to highlight in his re-election campaign.)
PS Steve
Was the 18 months unrealistic because it was a renovate-and-add versus new building? Why else would Cabot have been more complicated?
When I was in 10th grade, I went through both a start of school and mid-year school move due to construction delays that meant spending fall in a swing space and spring in a new building, so let me tell you why it’s disruptive even if the physical move goes well.
The start of a new school year is always a time of adjustment – new teachers, some new classmates, getting settled back into the school routine after the summer. One more adjustment, learning a new building, doesn’t make things that much worse. It always takes a week or two for everyone to settle in. And teachers can have a little time to get settled in before school starts.
However, coming back to school after winter break isn’t usually that big a deal. You still have the same teachers and classmates and classrooms. It only takes a day or so to get back into school mode. If you move buildings then, you turn that into a week or two of learning the new building, of feeling unsettled, of having to think about where to go if you need the bathroom. You have teachers who are also just learning the building and their new classrooms, and are feeling unsettled themselves.
I hope that helps explain why mid-year moves are best avoided if possible, for the sake of the students and teachers.
@Paul:
There was quiet talk about the Potter’s property for months before they came to a deal with the City. But the MSBA, the state funding assistance program that keeps an extremely tight rein on all aspects of enrolled projects, requires that land that is part of a project be owned or completely controlled by a municipality before it can show up as part of a project design. Our designers were working very hard to stay on the planning timeline prescribed by the MSBA and were making design progress submittals to them. Any design that incorporated the Potter property into Cabot plans before Newton controlled it would result in the MSBA halting the project or pulling out of their financial agreement with us.
Early on and prior to having Potter’s land on the radar, the architects explored a plan to keep the gym in a large new building mass to the north of the 1929 building, but there were many issues with this and the various city teams (Working Group, School Building Committee, Design Review Committee) rejected it, supporting instead the building layout we have now.
Then the City acquired the Potter property. We celebrated, as this allowed us to solve traffic/ circulation problems that weren’t otherwise going away. The design team felt comfortable that the then-current building layout remained the optimal solution and design continued apace.
But some community members felt that the Potter land allowed for unexplored possibilities. They created a graphic presentation that convinced many including a majority of City Councilors that a building planning exercise that incorporated the Potter land into it had merit, and this is what led to the pause.
The Angier and Zervas mid-year moves went smoothly, for what they were (a massive organizational and logistical operation), but they were quite disruptive. Teachers started disassembling their classrooms a month or more before the move, compromising the teaching and learning environments. Due to packing, moving and unpacking efforts, class schedules and calendars were shortened at the impacted schools. Teachers were setting up their new classrooms during their first few weeks in their new buildings. Students and teachers were understandably distracted during the whole midyear transition process, and although this was a once-in-a-school-career episode and we defended it, many in the parent community were upset that their kid’s educations were being impacted.
Regarding the 18 months, I hope that I communicated that under the smoothest of circumstances (Angier) 18 months was barely enough, but was justified as this interval allowed us to optimize the use of the Carr swing space and keep the next two elementary school projects moving along. We picked these intervals before we had benefit of the experience of building Angier and my belief is that we could have delivered Zervas in 18 months too if necessary.
But Cabot has at least four factors that add time: It is the largest building of the three, it has the smallest site, it includes a renovation, and it includes culvert site work. Even though many of us came around to the idea that a fall 2019 move-in was the realistic date, the biggest consequence of not discussing this sooner had to do with parent expectations (and I appreciate that we all should have communicated better). But it did not change our work effort nor should it have changed this.
In retrospect many who have been involved on the Cabot project would have gone all-new based upon what we now know, but the addition/renovation scheme has many defenders and we were never clear that we could get an all-new plan past Mass Historic.
Steve
Thanks for your comments Steve! As a member of the Cabot community who attended most but not all of the public meetings, I agree with nearly everything you said. I would still contend, though, that:
1) the “many defenders” of the add/reno scheme were in fact a small but loud group of neighbors who got Susan and Emily on board early and whom they both referred to many, many times as “the community” as opposed to the rest of us who were written off as “Cabot parents” (i.e. we only cared about how the project would affect our children currently in the school). I believe there was agreement on all sides that new construction would have been faster and cheaper, but we were convinced by that same small group that Newton Historic wouldn’t be as likely to recommend approval to Mass Historic unless we went along with add/reno. Fast forward to the “pause” discussion, when the same group attempted to turn Newton Historic against the project design that the committee had already approved, because that same small group still wasn’t satisfied about the location of the gym.
2) those same two Councilors poisoned the well, so to speak, with the rest of the council who were not as engaged on the project, asserting among other things that the rest of the schools slated for renovation would be adversely affected if the “pause” wasn’t approved.
We recognize the importance of having the professionalism of a structural engineer on the SC. Beyond any personal attacks or hoopla, the truth speaks for itself. Thanks for being committed to the school committee, Steve.
Thank you, Jake for your re-introduction. The Cabot project became a problem very early in your first term, and a lot has happened since. I don’t think it’s indicative of how you’ve approached you position since that time. You’ve taken a more thoughtful approach to issues that you have been involved in from the beginning. I particularly appreciate that you look to the data when the city has a plan set out for repair/rebuilding. The Mass. State Building Authority follows the same MO and has brought sanity to school building projects throughout the state. Just a quick reminder, though, that people count too and sometimes people trump the data.
As for Cabot, the problems arose because it was mishandled at the 11th hour. If that’s not accepted as accurate, then we’re likely to repeat the mistakes with building projects in the future. The municipal building process is quite clearly laid out: the Designer Selection Committee identifies several firms to complete the project and the mayor chooses one to complete it. Typically, no other architectural firms join the process. That did not happen with Cabot. At the 11th hour, another architect proposed a different plan, and the Potter property had nothing to do with the whole situation. It related to a group of people who wanted the gym placed elsewhere for a variety of reasons.
The city councilors from other wards stated quite clearly that they wouldn’t approve a project if the ward 2 councilors didn’t support it. The Potter property was never brought up to me as a reason why the council would not vote for the approved plan.
Other than that, I see Steve’s explanation to be accurate. However, he does not address the anxiety that the pause caused in the Cabot community. The alternate plan had serious flaws in how it laid out the educational plan inside the building. The facade and the placement of the gym became the overriding issue that people talked about, while the flaws to the educational program were not addressed or were downplayed.
Jake played a minor role in this process, given that he’d been on the council for about 5 months and the project was approaching the two-year mark at that point.
@Steve
Appreciate the follow-up response. As Joanna and Jane pointed out, I think the two things worth noting: 1) there were a group of neighbors that didn’t like how the gym placement would impact their sightlines and were continually looking for reasons to move the gym. We shouldn’t have validated their behavior by allowing an out-of-process consultation with our CCs after decisions have been made. 2) My understanding is that the CCs deferred to the Ward 2 representatives, who were the ones the felt we needed a pause (and that included Jake).
All that said, the issue that seemed clear to me and others, is what was best for the students: both in terms of optimal layouts and time/speed of construction was a new building. We were assured that the latter wasn’t true, and I’m not sure why that’s the case. If the community was told that a delay to September 2019 would be more likely with a renovation/addition, I doubt that would’ve been the choice.
@ Jake
Surprised that you’re staying quiet now. After reading Steve’s thoughtful posts, reading yours again is startling contrast.
I agree with Jane, you were new to the role, and so relative to Susan and Emily, less accountable for the mistakes that were made. But effectively blaming your constituents for confusing the facts, when you’re the one who is clearly wrong on the facts– own up to it and move on.