total time: 24.99 minutes
total words: 1348
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey Medford Bites listeners, in celebration of Black History Month, I wanted to highlight the story of a very important person in Medford's history, Belinda Sutton. I want to be mindful of bringing up slavery during Black History Month, and my focus on Belinda Sutton is not only on her enslavement by the royal family, but on her important contribution to the historical record of Medford. Next week on Valentine's Day, February 14th, will mark the same day in 1783 when Belinda Sutton presented her now famous petition to the Massachusetts General Court. For a little context, Sutton was born in Africa and enslaved by the royal family of Medford. After being enslaved for 50 years, she presented her petition in order to seek a pension from the estate of Isaac Royal Jr. Belinda's writing is important, not only as a powerful example of her strength and empowerment, but also for its important information about her life and the lives of other enslaved people from that time. According to the Royal House's website, Belinda Sutton's eloquent petition of 1783 is among the earliest narratives by an African American woman. It has inspired poets and fascinated historians. It has been seen by some commentators as the first call for reparations for American slavery, and it opens a rare window into the life of an enslaved woman in colonial North America. A copy of her full petition can also be found on the Royal House's website, and I've put a link in the show notes as well. In the next few weeks, I hope to continue to highlight Black History of Medford. Before we get into today's interview, I also wanted to make an announcement about some updates to Medford's process in regards to Charter Review. At tomorrow's City Council meeting, the Mayor will be asking the City Council to vote on a home rule petition to elect a Charter Review Commission on Tuesday, February 8th. For easy access, I've put a link in the show notes to contact information for City Council members in case you want to reach out to share your thoughts about how you'd like them to vote. The next Medford Charter Review Commission meeting will be held on Zoom on Wednesday, February 16th at 7 p.m. I've included a link to that meeting in the show notes as well. Next week's episode will be published on Valentine's Day. If you have a message you want me to read to a loved one, a romantic message, or another expression of love to a child, parent, friend, pet, etc., please message me on Instagram or email me at medfordpod at gmail.com. And now on to the interview. All right. Hi, thank you so much for meeting with me this morning. If you don't mind just starting out by introducing yourself with your name and pronouns and your role.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you for having me here. My name is Justin Tseng. My pronouns are he, him, his, and I am a city councilor in our great city of Bedford.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome. Thanks so much, Justin. Thanks for joining me and congratulations on the most recent election.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you so much.
[Danielle Balocca]: Um, so, uh, the question that I ask everybody that I have on the podcast, um, is about their favorite place to eat in Medford and what they like to eat there.
[Justin Tseng]: Uh, this is a toughie because, um, this sun changes, you know, day by day, week by week, even sometimes hourly. Um, but it's, um, somewhat early in the morning right now. And I'm really feeling some, um, pastries from Colette's maybe, uh, one of their sandwiches. I, um, there's this one sandwich that I love from them. that's some sliced deli meat and some pickles. And they keep, they don't slice up the pickles and it's these like little pickles they call cornichons. And it's just great, it's a great lunch.
[Danielle Balocca]: My two-year-old loves cornichons, which is like kind of an odd thing for a small child to love. Interesting. Yeah.
[Justin Tseng]: It took me a while to get around to pickles. Now I'm, I'm a fan now, but when I was growing up, I stayed really far away from them.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. I feel like you either like them or you don't. Awesome. Well, since we didn't get to talk before the election, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about kind of what motivated you to run. Yeah. Kind of what led up to that for you.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I would say that there were two moments that caused me to kind of think about really, really consider running for city council. The first moment that came up was around June of 2020. So quite early on, and it was budget season and the city was figuring out its budget. And at this point, it looked like And unfortunately, this is what happened. There were huge cuts, huge cuts to our education program, to our schools. And because I was once the student rep to the school committee, I had been, you know, in the last few years, I've been talking to friends on the school committee, talking to friends who are still teaching in our public school system. And on both sides, they were talking to me about this issue about how how they were facing such a big cut that they might have to close some AP programs, close some voc programs. They would have to ask director positions in our public school system, especially the director of guidance at the high school. There were just a multitude of cuts. Some cuts would have affected differently abled students. disproportionately. And so all of this, you know, stuck in my head. And I decided that, you know, I needed to do something. And so at first, it was more just reaching out to city councillors reaching out to, to different kind of decision makers in town, seeing what we could do to get a little bit more money. I mean, I understood there was a budget shortfall, so we couldn't get the budget that we wanted. But I believed that the cuts should have been distributed more equally for us to kind of make up for it in the future. But in any case, that didn't quite happen. We got some money from the federal and state governments to kind of reinvest in our school system, which was good, which meant that in the next year, we were able to invest more. But I just thought that we needed the city council that would have used its voice to really put an emphasis on funding our school system. Because I deeply believe that education is how you raise a society, and that each investment in our children is worth it. The other big moment was the movement for Black Lives and our general racial reckoning with race, both in our community and nationally. I believed that, and I was watching city council meetings and there was some contention about banners, about school renaming. And I think I realized that the political leadership in our city that we saw at the time didn't necessarily reflect the experience of people of color and didn't really necessarily reflect even the experience of Medford as a whole. Um, when I'm, you know, talking to my friends and neighbors, I think I get a sense that, um, people do want to talk about race, honestly, people want to move on and, um, and make sure that we are being productive and that we're being truthful with ourselves. And yet I think oftentimes on, in city council, I would, I would see, you know, all this all, all white body basically talk about how, um, their POC friends or BIPOC friends thought this way or that way, without really taking in the experience of the people on the ground or people even coming up to the podium at City Hall, speaking up at Zoom meetings. And so I thought it was important to have at least one, but hopefully in the future, more BIPOC leaders at the table at all times to say, you know, we have to remember to place racial justice as a priority. And so those were the two moments that really kind of spoke to me. And I got some, I had some encouragement from some elected officials to look at it, which I think makes all the difference. It's something that when you're in the field, a lot of BIPOC and women activists kind of bring that out as, as a great way to kind of try to get people of color, people from different marginalized groups to run is that encouragement from already elected officials.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. And so you bring up an interesting point that I've been thinking about is like in the debate, but the mayoral debate before the last election, I think that our current mayor brought up a point about what it's like to be a woman at city hall and sort of what the climate is like for basically non-cis white men at City Hall. And I think there's this idea of, OK, well, we need to bring diversity to City Hall. We need to have more diversity on city council and school committee. And I think there's sometimes an importance of, well, what is it going to be like for those BIPOC folks once they join city council? And so I wonder, and even for women, we've got a second woman on the city council now, too. And I guess, do you have any thoughts
[Justin Tseng]: that about what you know what city council maybe needs to be more inclusive or what the or if that's maybe if i'm making an assumption like what you know any feedback you have about that i definitely think our city institutions can be more inclusive i think there are actually a lot of people working for the city who are trying to move us in that direction and everyone has kind of is is chipping in ideas and i think there's a general um sense that that's the right direction to move in but you know there I think what kind of stands in the way of that is when people get used to a culture, when people get used to working in a certain environment, sometimes they don't recognize the existing kind of status quo as being particularly harmful or particularly kind of serving as a barrier. And I think it's important to start the conversations and debates that push past that And so at the city council level, I think a lot of what we can do is restructuring meetings, passing new rules to make sure meetings are running more efficiently and more respectfully. And I think the tone has changed since in this new city council, which I'm very happy with. I also think we all have good relationships with each other, even people who are revolution associated and are revolution associated, I think are getting on together very well. But I definitely do think there's a sense of, I think it's easier for leaders, Councilors to come from marginalized backgrounds to feel like you're being condescended to or feel like you're, you've been thrown into a white, you know, an old boys club. And, and I think, I think I, and this is, you know, I'm not point, I don't want to point fingers here at all. Right. But I think it's a general culture issue. And I think my hope is that some rules changes will help us, will help us a little bit, you know, in terms of moving past that culture and fostering an environment where, you know, you know, politicians of color, female politicians, women politicians, politicians from the LGBTQ community aren't taking kind of disproportionate lack from constituents, which I think oftentimes is the case.
[Danielle Balocca]: Sure. Yeah, we certainly saw some of that like in the when the zoom sessions around racial equity and like moving forward there. And it's you have a new new leadership on city council to write new president and vice. Yeah. And I can hear that like, I think we get comfortable in like our way of doing things. Like this is the way we've always done it. This is the way city council runs, right? And so when there's the median age of the city council also must have dropped significantly too. So it's like kind of fresher ideas, right? Like, and being open to those. And I think, and hopefully that shift in leadership just kind of will shake things up enough to be more open and receptive to what you're saying. Rules changes, just general climate of the council, yeah.
[Justin Tseng]: Right. Yeah, I think, um, you know, President morale and Vice President Bears, you know, they're, they're really leading the charge I think when it comes to changing the culture. So, it's, it's not, it's not even that you know. me or Kit that we're going about it alone. I think we have really good allies in this conversation. And I think they're willing to start the conversations that I think oftentimes when it comes to rule changes, right? I think because it means that people have to get used to a new way of doing things, you might get some, you know, pessimism from the general public or some kind of skepticism. but I think it's important to still have that conversation and to present our kind of viewpoint to the general public, try to sell our case when it comes to rules changes, because I think it's necessary for us to create a more inclusive environment.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, great. Well, thank you. I appreciate that reflection. I was wondering, maybe this is a little bit of a step back from this conversation, but if you have any kind of reflections on your experience of running for city council.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I think running for office isn't really the, it's not maybe what you see on TV or what you see in the news. It's really, in my experience, I found it to be a lot of day-to-day, just knocking on doors, making sure that you're talking to as many voters as possible. A lot of organization when it comes to you know, I'm getting this feedback, how do I, how do I kind of write it all down? How do I put it all in one place? How to remember it? So when, you know, if and if and or when I'm elected, right? How can I remember everything to kind of bring to city council? And a lot of that work is, on a day-to-day level looks quite tedious. I mean, it's really, you know, in the summer it was knocking on doors for hours at a time under like a 90 degree heat, right? And so it doesn't seem fun, but honestly, and I know some other candidates didn't feel this way, but I honestly started to enjoy the experience a lot. I really valued the chance to get to talk to people who are so far removed from my bubble and still be able to find some kind of common values or common ideas with them. And I think that's how we built a coalition to win the election is really trying to think outside of the bubble, thinking outside of the conversations that, you know, politicians and friends of politicians have within their own friend groups. I think I really valued that experience and it's something that I, as an elected official, I think I want to keep doing is try to keep reaching out to different different groups in town be it kind of religious, cultural, economic, political, all of these different types of groups, just because I think getting as far away from my political bubble as possible gives me a new perspective on issues. And perhaps, you know, I don't always agree with everyone else on an issue, but at least I can kind of embrace their perspective and understand where everyone else is coming from. So I really, really valued that during the campaign. And I think another big takeaway I got from the campaign was just, what types of messages, you know, the people of Medford wanted to really hear. Because, you know, we're all complex, right? We all have our own personal histories. And when you're running for office, you can't possibly talk about everything about yourself or everything about the ideas that you, you know, you can't go through all the policy ideas that you would want to advocate for. And so I think, going out on the door, you know, on the doorsteps, you know, you hear about what issues are truly relevant to our residents and what issues are kind of just things that you would want to work on, right? Like I, like I'll still work on them, but maybe it's something I'd put under the back burner for now.
[Danielle Balocca]: What were some of the, was there anything that like surprised you that came out as something that people were like concerned about?
[Justin Tseng]: You know, I think what actually surprised me was, um, was more about the neighborhoods, the differences in terms of priorities for different neighborhoods. Um, I think it, it was, it's a tough kind of, um, it's a tough circle to square when compared to another kind of lesson I drew out, which was that, um, I think there is a nationalization of kind of politics, even at the local level now, I think, um, Fox News and MSNBC, right, they're having a real effect on the kind of conversations that we're having at the doorsteps, but yet there's kind of still a neighborhood focus. And so while I think it's just that different neighborhoods have different priorities, some neighborhoods are particularly susceptible to climate change, right? And so voters there might talk more about flooding. They might talk more about climate change in general, yet, you know, in different neighborhoods, there might be some huge massive kind of under-investment in roads or in infrastructure or bus service. And so those are the issues that kind of come up. And I kind of, I think for some reason, I just assume, I think a lot of us assumed that people across the city with more laws to talking about similar issues. And yet, I think what we have is similar values, but different kind of needs for different neighborhoods. And so, you know, in the future, I'd like to see us kind of engage neighborhoods at even more of a local level. And so maybe one day we'll have charter review, and maybe we can look at having ward representation. That's something that I would be in favor of. I think in the meantime, finding ways to empower kind of ward style decision-making would help kind of address those differences and would help empower some people who've been traditionally left out of the political process as well. I think we can create committees with rules that would be more welcoming and more inclusive. And when you read through kind of policy reports put out by the city government in terms of racial justice, in terms of our climate action and adoption adaptation plan, you know, these are part of the recommendations is that we kind of engage people at the ward and at the ward level, basically.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I heard a lot about Charter Review award representation in the leading up to the election. And I know there's like they're working on sort of working towards another Charter Review. Do you know what where that's where that stands?
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I believe from what I've heard is we'll get a proposal in front of us sometime earlier this year, in the first half of this year, where City Council will have to kind of have that conversation. We'll be forced to have that conversation of whether we want to engage in Charter Review. I don't know how all of my colleagues think. I hope there's a majority for it on the City Council. It sounds, it sounds like, generally, this is kind of the feedback I've heard from Charter Review, kind of the people who are working in favor of Charter Review is that with a lot of the traditional holdouts in Charter Review, it's more of a question of the process. And so if we can give them faith that the process is going to be fair, they might be pro-Charter Review. And so I'm hopeful. Um, I think there's some work to do, but it's possible. It's not unrealistic that we can get on top of it this year.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome. Um, so you, you spoke a little bit about some of the ideas that like led you to run, what are you, what are your goals for your first term? Like, what are you excited about?
[Justin Tseng]: Oh, yeah. Um, you know, I, the, the goals for the first term, I think are basically, um, to listen, right, to have a city council that listens more to the public. So that's more of a culture kind of thing, less policy, but more and more of a kind of try to change the culture on city council type of thing. And so that's kind of why I started to put out the council updates every week on my Facebook page. I'm gonna try to keep it up as much as possible, but you know, These are kind of like Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Twitter posts, I post them as everywhere I can. And basically, they kind of give everyone an update on what City Council is working on, what's been passed, what's moved into committees, what's been tabled, what maybe was rejected. And that way, I think the wish for that is that we kind of open that channel communication on social media where people can give me feedback. On, on the work that the city council is doing what they and what they want us to kind of what they want us to see us doing in addition to what we've already been doing. And I think so opening as many channels of communication as possible for me to be a better kind of for city council to be a better listener. I think that's one of my top priorities as a Councilor. I think when we look ahead to the budget, there'll be priorities when it comes to schools, right? Making sure that we have more school funding, because I believe we're lagging behind our surrounding towns when it comes to school funding. And, you know, I'm a strong believer that really the core problem with the Medford public school system isn't the teachers that are programs or anything like that. It's more about, it's just about funding. And I think in terms of other kind of priorities moving forward, I would like to see our city kind of be more ambitious when it comes to reaching our climate goals. And so I believe that there's a lot of, there are a lot of policies that kind of we can work on ordinances that we can work on as city council, budget items that we can work on with the mayor to get into the next budget. that's all about kind of investing in our climate, investing in our climate infrastructure, investing in environmental justice kind of areas, right, of town, which tend to be more susceptible to flooding, tend to be places with key islands. And my hope is that we're able to either in package form or item by item pass a bunch of kind of climate friendly policies And so that's kind of where my mind is at now. But of course, the listening will always affect that. But these are some of my priorities for this first year in office.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you yeah and I usually ask another question about how you hope to get feedback from from residents and you answer that as your first sort of priority there so sounds like you'll be well we can be expecting some future posts from you that people can engage with. You also accept kind of feedback through email or there other ways to get.
[Justin Tseng]: So yeah, you can reach me at both either my campaign email or my city email. My campaign email is justin4medford.com and my city email is jseng-ma.gov. So I take emails there. Phone calls work too. Um, my phone, my phone number, I've, I've, I have a special line for city council stuff. Um, it's listed on my website, um, which I don't, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's a number I don't really have off the top of my head. Um, but it's, it is on my website and my website is www.justinforemedford.com. And there's also a form there where you, if you have feedback, you can write right on the form and I'll see it. Um, yeah, so those are some of the ways to reach out to me, although. They're always, if you want to set up a meeting, you know, I'm always open to that. And I think, especially, hopefully, case numbers die down very soon and, you know, everything's calmer. I'll be able to do more outreach on my end, as well, to different communities in town. So that's certainly my hope is, is that we open as many channels of communication as possible. And if anyone has kind of a suggestion for me, kind of how I can, how I can do that, I'm willing to, I'm definitely all ears.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome, thank you. I can put that in our show notes too, so people can access that. So before we wrap up, one question that I was asking candidates that might be fun for you to answer is, I was asking them like kind of something about you yourself that we might not know. So something like, not about your political work or anything like that, but something about you, like a fun fact about you that we might not otherwise hear about.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, a fun fact about me, I guess, Some people know this, but I think most people who don't know me personally don't know this. I love learning languages. I'm such a language nut. So basically, I don't speak everything perfectly, but I can have conversations in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. And I think language is the way to kind of, engage with people at a deeper level. And so, you know, I love going to countries and having, you know, if I have a chance to travel, right, like, talking to people in their native tongue, or kind of talking to people here in their native tongue, it's something I love to do. And I get really nerdy with it. So I, I, I love to study kind of word roots and word history. Look at how words became the way they are, and how they kind of shape our thoughts and our processes and our in our culture. And so that's definitely, you know, I think a lesser known side to me that I think is, it's pretty fun. And it's kind of opened the doors to kind of a lot of different kind of TV shows and different movies that I love to watch and yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, and it sounds like a real asset for residents, right? If they if English isn't their primary language of communication, like being able to have somebody that they can go to to communicate their needs. Yeah.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah. I mean, I definitely think that's that's, you know, it's something that residents should kind of take take advantage of. I've been I've I've been helping some Chinese speaking residents recently who residents who don't speak English. I think that's something that we need a lot more investment I think it's kind of how we move towards racial justice in our city. I think language justice is a huge key in that. And so I wholeheartedly think that, you know, our city should be investing resources to kind of let people engage in their own languages. I have this mantra, this kind of saying that's we need to meet people where they are. We shouldn't expect people to come to City Hall. And so I think, you know, language is a huge part of that.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I've been here. I think Kit mentioned this when I talked with her about updating the website and language being a big part of that, like how people can use the website, not just to pay their water bill or whatever.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the kind of ideas that I have for the website, and I need to talk to more people in the city administration about how we could get this done is have it kind of walked into Medford page or Medford 101 page where, you know, presented in different languages, targeted at people who haven't lived in the city for a long time. But, you know, it would be a resource that anyone in the city could use, but it's just kind of a guide to, you know, how to pay your bills, how to kind of report problems in the city, how to do this, how to do that. What does trash collection look like? Um, that's something I heard from a lot of new residences, um, is that sometimes all the information can be hard to find. So I think, you know, putting it in one place and then translating that into a bunch of languages, I think that'd be super helpful for our city. So that's one of the kind of, um, one of my goals for this year as well. Um, hopefully we can get, um, get something done on that front, but it's definitely right. I, um, part of the problem right now is that we're using Google translate for all the languages.
[Unidentified]: Hmm.
[Justin Tseng]: And so sometimes the translations aren't consistent or aren't really accurate. And so it's not very clear to residents who don't speak English, well, you know, what time things are open or how you do X, Y, Z. Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Sure, sure. Awesome. Well, that's all really exciting. Is there anything else that you want to make sure to mention before you wrap up today?
[Justin Tseng]: Nothing that's on my mind, but if, you know, I'm, I'm always open to ideas right um I love hearing feedback I love. If you have policy ideas that you think our city should be adopting. I would love an email from you and I just love to read through kind of all on all the ideas because you know, I, I'm pretty pragmatic and pretty flexible. And I think that's part of the way I work is I have my core values and my ideals, but I want to listen to as many people as possible to kind of make sure that we all are on the same page moving forward. And so I'd love to study kind of any ideas that people have for our city. Awesome.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thank you so much, Justin. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Yeah, hopefully we can connect again in the future.
[Justin Tseng]: Definitely.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks. Thank you so much to Councilor Tseng. Just a reminder, next week is Valentine's Day. If you have a message you want me to read to someone you love, send me an email or message me on Instagram by the end of the day on February 13th and I will read it on next week's episode. Don't forget to stop by 4 Good Vibes in Medford to pick up a gift and a free Medford Bites sticker. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode and as always, if you have feedback about this episode or ideas for future episodes, you can email medfordpod at gmail dot com. You can also subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.
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total time: 24.99 minutes total words: 1348 |
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