total time: 2.92 minutes
total words: 93
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you so much for hosting this and thank you all for being here. My name is Anna Callahan and I am a first term incumbent. I am really proud of the things that we did this term. We took many steps to stabilize our city's budget. We really worked on our rodent problems, enabling our staff to be able to take more actions. To reign those in we we protected did a number of things to protect our residents from the Trump administration And we've taken steps toward more affordable housing and affordability in our city and you can count on me To be a vote in favor of what I believe are the values that we share here in Medford and that includes affordability and affordable housing. It includes environment and climate change. It includes being a more inclusive city. But today, I want to highlight for you the things that make me unique as a city councilor. And that really is in the question of democracy and engaging people in the political process. I take it very seriously that 90 or 95% of the people who live in Medford will never come to a city council meeting and they will never reach out to their city councilors. So I take it upon myself to spend my time and effort in going into the community and listening to those people so that they have a voice. I currently have five different teams of volunteers who help me with different parts of my city councilorship. The first one, and by the way, if anybody here wants to be on one of these teams, please do let me know. The first one is what I call my legislative team. It's a group of people who meets with me before every city council meeting, and we go through every item on the agenda. They do a lot of research, they'll reach out to other members of the community. It's a great way to really level up people who already are active. The second team I call my democracy team. This is a group of people that helps me to set up listening sessions throughout the community. Sometimes they're based on a policy, sometimes they're based on a demographic group, sometimes they're just in a neighborhood. And then I have three different policy teams. One of those is around trees because we plant less than half as many trees each year as we lose. So we are organizing, we're gonna be organizing with the city to have events where big groups of neighbors come together to plant trees in our most barren neighborhoods. The second one, the other two are around housing and housing affordability. One is a group of people that came to me and were interested in getting co-housing here in Medford. And the last one is around home sharing, which is really enabling people to age in place. So if anyone's interested in working with me, please let me know. And I really appreciate you all being here.
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total time: 2.92 minutes total words: 93 |
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