Roads, pride, police, lit drops

Walk & Talk About Safety, Traffic & Community Access

In my ongoing journey to learn as much as I can about transportation in Medford, I attended an event called "Walk & Talk About Safety, Traffic & Community Access". This was a tour of different paths along Route 16, attended by a combination of city hall planners and community groups that cared about bicycle paths, traffic patterns, the state of the roads, and how traffic lights work. I spoke at length with one of Medford's Democratic Ward Chairs; the head of recreation at the Mystic Valley YMCA, who I talked to about after school programs; Medford's Director of Traffic and Transportation; and the head of the Office of Planning, Development, & Sustainability. People from the Medford Bicycle Advisory Commission and Walk Medford were also there, and we spoke a lot about exactly what bike lanes in Medford would mean and where they would potentially be placed. At one point, a fellow on his bike passed by the crowd and asked what we were doing. He was new to Medford, he explained, and was wondering why there were so few bike paths. I stayed after to listen to the chat between many of the longtime city planners, attempting to keep up with their conversation and slowly realizing that I was in over my head as they discussed funding mechanism for repaving different sections of the city, Eversource, and so on.

An instance, noted during the walk, of one of the many flaws of Medford’s infrastructure, at the end of the John D. Hand Memorial Bridge.

Later, while doorknocking, I had two encounters that stuck with me. One was from a fellow who immediately asked me, "what do you think of bike paths?" I told him that I was supportive, but that it was something I was still learning about and that there were a lot of different factors to consider when deciding where to lay out bike paths in a given municipality. I think he was looking for a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. "You lost my vote!" he replied. I asked him what his experiences were with it. "I drive a big truck," he said. "You put bike paths on roads, I can't see a thing! It's too narrow!" This sentiment was echoed by a firefighter who lived in Medford but worked in Somerville. "I don't want Medford to be like Somerville," he said. It was difficult to navigate firetrucks along those roads.

I later texted two of the people from the Walk & Talk event to set up coffee to go over more specifics of a comprehensive transportation plan what the City Council could do to help.

Pride month kickoff

The pride month kickoff, in front of City Hall, was attended by pretty much all of the announced city council candidates. On a nice and sunny Thursday, most everyone had a good time. The center of attention was really Jaclyn Torres Roth, chair of the Pride Planning Committee and another new city council candidate, who had put the event together. The line of speakers was prestigious and included the Mayor and Congresswoman Katherine Clark. My favorite in the lineup were the representatives from Medford High School's Gay-Straight Alliance. They were the youngest speakers, probably by about a decade, and were clearly not used to speaking in front of crowds. Seeing teenagers put themselves out there in front of a crowd of activists and politicians as representatives of the community took guts. After the event, they raised a rainbow flag in front of city hall.

Someone remarked, at one point, that my flannel was not colorful enough for the event. It’s the most colorful thing I own.

Lessons from the lit drops

One minor incident offers an interesting backend view to the campaign. On Monday, I was canvassing around Wellington, which is an area of Medford that sees fewer city council candidates knocking doors, since it's spread out and houses are harder to get to. I volunteered there with a teenager who'd lived there all his life and had advised me to spend time canvassing in his neighborhood. "People in Wellington aren't going to vote for someone who never canvassed there," he told me. We spent three hours knocking doors and putting fliers in other areas.

The next day, someone notified me of a post on one of Medford's Facebook groups. A resident of Wellington had taken a picture of one of my fliers, which he'd found on the sidewalk, among several others. He had picked them up and was a bit heated at the littering from a political candidate. I texted my volunteer, who said that he had been putting fliers in fences because he didn't think he was supposed to enter people's yards if the gate was latched. Many of the fliers had fallen out of the fences and onto the sidewalk. A minor Facebook argument had broken out.

After overthinking the wording, I posted this:  

Within about five minutes, the man had deleted his post. He sent a message after this apologizing, saying he didn't want to harm my campaign. I said that there was no need, and that it was excellent feedback (and this was true — it’s good to hear about these things early on, so I know to tell volunteers best practices for lit drops).

This incident, while minor, is interesting to me and worth illustrating because it shows how arguments can break out among perfectly reasonable people, which often happens at the local level (though bad-faith actions can also happen, I don't think that was the case here). Communication was key to resolving everything. My volunteer simply didn't understand best practices in lit dropping, because I had failed to explain them; the fellow who had found the literature on the sidewalk didn't want his neighborhood littered; and the Facebook users either agreed with him or saw him attacking a political candidate unnecessarily. A lot of it happened because people didn't see each other face to face.

Police Community Meeting

The Police Community Meeting on Tuesday was attended by about a dozen people. They told me afterwards that no politician or political candidate had attended one in a very long time (to be fair, that particular community meeting was held during a city council meeting, though I'm unsure if this is common practice). I had met the police chief at the pride kickoff and told him that I would attend, but he had a "wait-and-see" approach to my promise. I arrived half an hour late, so I refrained from asking questions initially, in case it had already been covered. A lot of the previous conversation related to policies surrounding body-worn cameras and citizen oversight. This was a hot topic in recent years and the subject of some friction between the police and groups like Medford People Power.

Gradually we got to police recruitment issues. Medford Police were having a difficult time with recruitment. The biggest reason, they said, was that most applicants were out of shape and could not pass the physical, a combination of sit-ups, push-ups, and a timed 1.5-mile run. (The military has had similar recruitment issues in recent years.) I started asking about salaries of new recruits, and was informed that they had a base pay of about $65,000. That salary wasn't high enough to live on in Medford if a young person were looking to buy a house. I brought up this point; they said that recruits could and usually did take on extra shifts — about 50 hours a week total, for around $95,000 — and that they often lived outside of the city.

Update on August 3rd, 2023: A previous version of this post implied that Safe Medford took a position on body-worn cameras. The actual group was Medford People Power. Safe Medford has never taken a position on body-worn cameras. The post has been updated to reflect this.