[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. Thank you both for being here with me today. If you don't mind just starting with an introduction, so if you could say your name, pronouns, and just a bit about who you are.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Thanks. I'm Josh Eckert-Lee. I use he, him pronouns. I live over on Main Street just by Bob's. I'm an organizer with Medford for Palestine and a public employee who works in the sustainability planning space next door in Somerville.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you.
[Micah Kesselman]: And I'm Micah Kesselman. My pronouns are he, him. I am also an organizer with Medford for Palestine. I also actually live in South Medford, a little bit further away from Bob's than Josh does. But and yeah, I I'm principally an advanced software and IP attorney in my life outside of organizing around this stuff here in our city.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. Thank you both. And, you know, you've both been on the podcast before to talk about the beginning of the efforts for divestment. So we'll talk a lot more about that today before we do. I know you've answered this question before, but if you could tell us again, maybe it's something different this time. Your favorite place to eat in Medford and what you like to eat there.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah, thanks for having us back, Daniel. I always appreciate your time. I think mine has changed, because now that it is really cold out, I have been finding a lot of warmth and comfort at a Pikaichi ramen, which is just fabulous when it gets miserable and cold and gray out. So very much a fan.
[Unidentified]: OK.
[Micah Kesselman]: It's always a harder question than I expected it to be. Yeah, I guess that lately I've been, actually I was at Locolito super recently and it was the first time I was there and it was awesome. It was phenomenal. So that's my current favorite place to eat.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: That pistachio croissant is fabulous.
[Danielle Balocca]: I think they're the same thing. Yeah, we've been on a little bit of a hiatus since the local election, but Locolito has opened in the time that since our last episode. So I'm glad you mentioned that, Micah, and didn't want to just throw you totally off before you talk about all the stuff, you know, a lot of stuff about. So, yeah, no, that's it's a great place. The owners are super friendly. Hopefully they'll come on the podcast someday because I think they have a lot. Yeah. Well, thank you. So we've had you on a few months ago, I think, at this point to talk about the ordinance around divestment in Medford. And since we talked to you, there have been a lot of things that have happened. So some updates. So I'm wondering if you could just give us like a little picture of what's happened since the last time we spoke.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah, sure. So when we last spoke, we had just introduced an ordinance, the values aligned local investments ordinance. into city council chambers and we're gathering support from local organizations and residents to show up to City Hall and express their support for making sure our tax dollars are sort of in line with the values we all share as Medford residents. Since then, it's gone through a couple of months of revisions and updates at City Council. We were hearing a lot of feedback from our neighbors. We were updating the ordinance accordingly, getting legal review, as you heard, Mike is a lawyer, so he was really instrumental in some of that work. And it finally got through City Council and passed their sort of third reading, which is the sort of official passage of the ordinance into law. And then, Mayor Brianna Longo-Cohen decided that she would use her first ever veto. The mayoral sort of power to veto an ordinance is something she hasn't used previously. And she decided that this would be her chance to leave a mark and try to sort of overrule the city council. Whether she was appealing to some base or just didn't believe in the ordinance itself, it was unclear. She provided some Deeply sort of confusing legalese when she vetoed the ordinance that. We fully rebutted in our city council sort of meetings, but she's still sort of. I guess, took it for granted that folks would be intimidated by the legal jargon. But thankfully, the city council has been really, really strong allies as we try to move this ordinance forward, and they overrode the mayor's veto. And so the ordinance is now the law of the land in Medford as of the second week of November. And that's where we are now.
[Danielle Balocca]: Wow, and can you say a little bit about what helped you? Was there any organizing that happened after that veto that helped get better information out there? Or what did you do to help that city council vote?
[Micah Kesselman]: Yeah, I can take this one. So basically, when that veto hit, Activity on the ordinance serves bifurcated into like two different things right, the city Councilors who are working on it and who were sponsoring it. They did their thing they reach out to staff talked internally, so much as much as they could because of open meeting laws and everything. And you know, did their own thing. In Medford for Palestine, we really focused on putting together a comprehensive rebuttal and response to what the mayor had asserted in her letter that accompanied the veto. And we're really just focused on sort of advocating to the public and as much as we could, and just informing people of what the situation was and trying to explain as much as possible. And that actually ended up being quite a bit more work than I think any of us were anticipating. Josh mentioned, I guess I mentioned, I'm an attorney in my day job. That said, I am not a municipal. law attorney. I don't know. I'm not a finance law attorney. I don't like this is very, has been very dog at a keyboard experience for me. But, you know, what we ended up doing, or what I ended up doing was diving into as much as I could find the actual case law and other city policies around some of the more nuanced and more clear cut and like easily or straightforwardly argued legal concerns that the mayor's office had. Specifically, that was with regards to the 55B in state law, which regulates how city treasurers can perform their duties to a degree. And as it turns out, there's not actually a whole lot of state law on Any of that, I mean, the black letter law is there, but there's not a whole lot of court cases or precedent that's really come down along the way regarding that. So just researching that and looking at what other cities are doing that might in any way invoke that specific statute at the state. So that was a lot of work, but otherwise, yeah, like I said, a lot of it's just been sort of advocating and public outreach.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah. And what was going on at the same time as we were sort of organizing to get the veto overridden was like municipal elections that were happening here in Medford. So we really tried to show up as volunteers with the progressive candidates who had originally sort of supported this ordinance through city council and were able to sort of combine our efforts to organize and support progressive city council candidates and getting voters aware of this issue and aware of this item on the city council agenda. So the timing with the election was a really helpful way to engage folks during an already sort of higher level of engagement amongst residents.
[Danielle Balocca]: I do wonder how the municipal election and not having another mayoral candidate impacted her decision for that veto. But could you just kind of summarize what some of her pushback was about or what other concerns maybe you heard about people that weren't sure if they supported this?
[Micah Kesselman]: Yeah, the biggest pushback was like I mentioned that 55B mass gen law. which basically says that a treasurer has to seek the highest, the highest interest, or the, the, um, has to invest money, not even highest value, it has to yield the highest interest. which is, and that's actually a key thing of like part of the response was that, you know, stocks don't yield interest, stocks appreciate in value. So it's clearly focused on cash deposits and other sort of lending based transactions that cities can engage in. But that was a big one. The problem was that, and we mentioned this before that, you know, KP Law and the mayor didn't really explain why they thought the statute, the ordinance violated that state law. So we sort of had to imagine what our opposition was thinking, which is definitely how law is supposed to work. It's great.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah. She, in her letter, really sort of rested on the idea that this ordinance just hadn't gone through the level of due diligence and like response and stakeholder engagement that she seems to believe it needed. Despite the fact that there was a ton of stakeholder engagement and direct conversations with the treasurer collector with the mayor's office with legal counsel. It's, it's difficult to square away the meter that the mayor's sort of concerns with the reality of the work went into it by us as organizers, by Council President Bears as the bill's sponsor. This was really done in good faith, which is not the sentiment we're getting from the mayor's office.
[Micah Kesselman]: Yeah, and the impact assessment too. That was another aspect where she demanded in her accompanying letter that, or didn't demand, but raised the concern that the severity of the impact on our investments hadn't really been investigated, which, and this is another thing that we talked about last time we were on, we literally explicitly, that was done, we did that. So it was a lot of FUD, a lot of nonsense, basically, that was brought up.
[Danielle Balocca]: Okay, yeah, and and I'm just talking to like normal regular people in Medford that don't really know anything about or like, you know, wouldn't have studied this at all or don't like, you know, I think hearing the name of the bill they might or the ordinance think that. we would lose money on this. And I know we talked about this last time, and I think that's like a common misconception and where our city's budget is always a little precarious. I hear a lot of people worrying about that. And now, you know, if you go on Facebook on any day, all you're going to see is a story about trash. But I think people connecting that with like, how can we do these two things at the same time? And I guess I'm wondering how you would dispel that mythic if there's anything like a little more concrete you can share. And then also like how this will be rolled out like at what's the pace which with like our investments might change.
[Micah Kesselman]: So, the. So, for as far as the financial impact on our city goes, like I mentioned just a moment ago. Zach actually did run through and look at what would be divested from, and it's like literally one or two stocks. Josh can speak to it better than I can, but I think it's like right now or something.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: We have a portfolio that includes, the total portfolio is about $20 million and that includes stocks in Lockheed Martin and Chevron. So like world's biggest arms manufacturer, world's largest global polluter, pretty good to try and shuffle our money out of. But of course, it's not just totally in those two. It's a large portfolio that just is big companies, whether or not they are doing work in line with our interests.
[Micah Kesselman]: And and what's shuffled out of those investments is shuffled back into other investments. It's not like we're like a word. It's not like the orders are structured in a way where it says we take the money out of there and then we just burn it in a pit by the river. Right. Like we actually it like it goes back into investment vehicles.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah. We added language in the ordinance that was really like specifically targeting this. We gave some guidance to the treasure collector's office per their request for the super technical sounding M-S-C-I-E-S-G sort of methodology, which is just a whole bunch of letters, but it's a sort of globally recognized environmental social governance ESG investing methodology that is already designed to take into account different documents tied to international norms and laws. So when we don't want to invest in companies participating in global genocides, this document utilizes UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, United Nations Minorities Declaration, all these like international law to guide that sort of granular decision making on how industries participate in those global harms. And we also have data when we were advocating for this, that showed that funds that do do sustainable investing, because it's not just you know, divestment from fossil fuels and, as Micah said, burning it in a pit. It's reinvestment and aligning our investments with our values. Funds that do this kind of investment see either just a sort of neutral, it's the same big stock market that affects our funds the same exact way, or nominally positive returns. Different teachers unions have divested their pensions and have seen positive feedback because there's a ton of companies out there. And when you're not actively destroying communities or imprisoning people or killing people, you tend to make just enough money and get good returns on investment. Not that that should matter, right? But it is, simply put, propaganda to say that these two things can exist, that our values and our investments can exist in harmony. propaganda by people who don't want us to take money out of these, you know, controversial stocks, because they depend on all of us to just blindly put our money in their accounts, because they're big and because they're valuable. That's just not the case.
[Micah Kesselman]: Well, and I mean, and it's worth saying to that, like, you know, even though we're using an ESG index, it is not a it's not a an instructive, sort of, ordinance, right? What it is doing is it's using that, the MSCI ESG index. And there's a component of it that says, these are the stocks you don't want to invest in. I mean, it would be, I personally would love it if we're seeing everything into actual, like investing in ESG, but nevertheless, that's not what this is. And that's neither here nor there. This is simply saying, we're not going to invest in these bad actors that have been identified on this. So it's a proscriptive or prohibitive sort of guidance that has been given. So with that said, I mean, like the stock market's a real big market or the U.S. stock market, at least. So, you know, whenever there is something that you're divesting from, there's always opportunities to invest in something else. Though I think it's worth mentioning, though, as part of my research, like I mentioned, one of the things I looked at was other city policies for investments where they were able to direct the investment. There's this whole thing that Josh mentioned before, I think, but with retirement funds, we can't actually touch those because that's like a state thing. But every city has its own policy for what they can touch. And you look at other cities and one of the things that they do, and maybe this is something that eventually we'll be able to do ourselves, is they have policies where they focus their investments into the city. So they will direct and prioritize investments into their own city that get a return. And it's not necessarily gonna be like, they're not gonna be slam dunk investments, right? But they will be put into banks that do cash deposits and other sort of lending based investments locally within banks in the city that then finance opportunities within local businesses in the city itself. And that's another, direction eventually that we could go. And now that we're not sending that money into the stock lines of Chevron and these other bad industries, we can maybe direct it back into our own city.
[Danielle Balocca]: Imagine that. Well, yeah. So it sounds like we are now taking money out of those two companies or those two funds. What happens next? Like when does when does this kick in? What's kind of the future plan?
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: So the ordinance language did set the end of this year, December 31st, 25. You know, we've got three weeks for this to go into effect. Whether or not that means the treasurer collector will start doing the work we'll see. It's likely that it will begin and it will take some like partnership and doing accountability work with us as residents like we do with our like police oversight work or anything like that to make sure that this is happening at all and happening in a way that is in line with the ordinance language. We also in the ordinance give the city council sort of like an annual review responsibility. So end of the year 2026, there will also be a sort of city council review of the ordinance and the sort of methodologies put into it. So it's coming up soon. And there's a lot of work still to do with tracking and holding the city accountable, because that's how we got to this place to begin with. And it takes continued sort of pressure and awareness from residents to make these ordinances successful. Otherwise, they're just a piece of paper.
[Danielle Balocca]: And what happens if we're not in compliance with that ordinance by the end of 2026?
[Micah Kesselman]: I mean, at the end of the day, it's words on paper, right? This is true for almost all of our ordinances and city laws. If the city is in violation of its own laws, then that's a big problem. And there's processes for that that vary depending on the severity of the violation, obviously. But it also comes to the ballot box, too, in a large way. Yeah, there isn't really like, there's, in our ordinances, we don't really have a stick power to like swap someone for not doing their job, but it is their job to, it is the administration's job, the mayor's office's job as the executive in our city to enforce the ordinances that the city council puts into effect. With that said, you know, one of the things that I know the city council is gonna pay close attention to is, you know, whether or not for practical logistical reasons, after it goes into effect, more amendments need to be made just for it to actually work smoothly. That's something that can always happen. Like Josh said, there's built-in amendment mechanisms. Also, the city council can always amend ordinances. That's just how laws work and how city councils work, at least our city council works. So there will be sort of an ongoing real-time learning aspect to this as well when it goes into effect. But for it to meet the bare minimums of what it demands, which is divesting from the two companies that came up in the sort of preparation for proposing the ordinance in the first place, That's a click of a button. That can be done easily. There should not be any reason that that doesn't happen by the target date.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah, absolutely. It was designed with ease and strategic viability in mind. So we don't see this as an onerous burden on the city staff. I'm a public employee. I totally get it when city councils try to pass different ordinances to make staff do all sorts of different things. But this was really designed with empathy towards city staff in mind. So it really should not be a hard lift. the work of doing a deeper dive in analyzing our other sort of funds that we may not have caught as residents accessing public information will maybe take a bit more time, but only within the abilities and jurisdiction of the treasurer collector.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. And when we were chatting kind of before we started recording today, you were both mentioning that there is some extension of this at the state level. So I'm wondering if you could give us a little information about that.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Absolutely. Like for us in Medford, right, the big pot of money that there is that is invested is our like public employees pensions. This bill like does not touch pension accounts at all. Public employees are not going to see any change to that fund. But it is a major opportunity and place where city money can and probably should be invested responsibly. To change that, it takes state legislation to allow our pension board, you know, the Medford Retirement Board, to invest with these values in mind. For myself, I work for the city of Somerville. And over a decade ago, the Somerville Retirement Board voted to divest its pensions from fossil fuels. But Because there wasn't sort of accompanying state legislation, despite attempts from our various reps over the years to get it there. the pensions have not been divested from fossil fuels because they're controlled by this state and agency called PARAC, who kind of monitors and restricts what we can do with our public retirement funds, which is generally like a good thing. But without state legislation, they're not acting on these resolutions of the retirement boards themselves. So we need to do some advocacy with our reps to allow those pensions to be invested responsibly. And then the other sort of state advocacy component is that there are larger like statewide divestment bills that are happening that are happening because of sort of groundswell of support that is coming from cities like Medford having successful ordinances like this. So there's bill H-2984, which is relative to pension divestment from companies who provide military equipment to Israel. That's like a super direct bill in the House that would sort of bring these values from this ordinance across the state and to pension funds. That is sponsored by our sort of neighboring rep, Euterhoven. And then there's also the Act for Responsible Development, or Responsible Investment, which is sponsored by our own rep, or rather our own Senator Jalen. That's House 3001, State 1399, I think. And that is also pulling our state investments from weapons manufacturers and preventing future investment in weapons manufacturers. So it's both of these sort of elements that we captured in our ordinance blown up to the state level.
[Micah Kesselman]: Yeah, and it's important to understand that the retirement and pension fund issues, like there's a very good reason that the state maintains control of that. And that's really just because all of those funds are just batched together. They can't differentiate between Medfords versus Somerville versus whomever. So even logistically, it just does not make sense for cities to have their individual investment policies applied to those pension funds, because it's just not practically feasible. So what that means is that it is really important to reach out to and lobby your state delegation, your state representatives, to push forward on that because It just has to be managed from there. And that is really where the biggest chunk of investment money comes from. I don't know offhand how much is in the Medford pension funds, but I imagine it's probably significantly larger by an order of magnitude than what we're talking about with just our own city ordinance. But, you know, on top of the divestment legislation that's at the state, you also do have, you know, there's a lot of calls that have been made to the, you know, the governor, too, and various companies that she's solicited to come into the state from Israeli companies in particular. I forget the name of it, but, you know, everyone is aware of like the MGH, like AI, There's an AI company that's doing like healthcare informatics that is from Israel. And then they're opening up some sort of partnership with MGH, I believe, here in Massachusetts. And she was a big, Haley was a big, is a big supporter of that, despite a lot of pushback. So, you know, just keeping aware of what is happening at the executive level in our state too. sending out emails, making calls, that is really important.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. Yeah, that's helpful to understand the issues around the pension and retirement funds there. Are there any other advocacy efforts that Medford for Palestine is working on?
[Micah Kesselman]: So this is not something that we're working on as a focused unified action yet in Medford for Palestine, but we do, it is something that's on a lot of our radars and some of us are individually working on it and to one degree or another. And that's the antisemitism community or the antisemitism committee. I recently pushed forward recommendations to the school systems to implement the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been colloquially referred to as basically the Don't Say Palestine Act, because it is inherently, deeply anti-Palestinian and very problematic, and that is despite mountains of testimony from advocacy groups in general, but even many Jewish advocacy groups that were concerned that it's a bad rule. It's not good. It's anti-Palestinian, and it's effectively anti-Semitic in its own, at the end of the day, in its own right. So pushing back against that, the... Sorry, can you expand on that a little bit?
[Danielle Balocca]: Can you explain a little more about that are being proposed there.
[Micah Kesselman]: So effectively, what the guidance, the recommendation does is it equates anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. And that includes a criticism of how Valid criticism of the state of Israel as being an apartheid state would effectively be considered anti-Semitic. and students could be kicked out of school for it. Teachers can be put, have disciplinary action taken against them for it. It's pretty wild, especially when, if you want to, if you're a history teacher, teaching perhaps about the history of the Middle East, where Israel and the Nakba and the many wars, the Six-Day War have, a pretty pivotal part of that. So yeah, the issue is that basically it equates valid political analysis and criticism with anti-Semitic speech. And it is, and in effect, it has a disproportionately bad impact on Palestinians and Palestinian Americans. And it also, again, feeds into this historical antisemitic trope actually of dual loyalty for Jews, of Jews being loyal to Israel first before the West. And this is like a very bad trope that has resulted in a lot of bad things. So yeah, there's a lot of reasons to dislike the recommendation. I will that's just a recommendation. And currently it is the, I forget that it's the DSE Josh maybe you know what the acronym stands for I think the Department of elementary elementary education. Yes, yeah. Thank you. the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has declined to implement this recommendation, but they're under a lot of pressure to, absolutely. So one thing people can do if they don't want to see this in the schools, in Medford Public Schools, which I certainly don't, that is to reach out to their state representatives and say, hey, make sure the DESC holds holds to this ground like holds their ground like they stick with this and they don't they don't buckle to what I'm sure is a lot of lobbying and pressure to implement this recommendation, despite how bad it is. So that is something that that is that is that is one action item that I think anyone can you know, take up and help with. And it literally is just, there's automated email scripts you can find now, so you can send an email with literally the click of a button in like two to five minutes of your time.
[Danielle Balocca]: Wow, that's helpful to know.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: And the same level of effort is necessary to support the sort of statewide responsible investment ordinances. organizers and neighbors have spent a lot of time trying to make it as easy and user friendly as possible. So truly it's two clicks and one of them is on send on an email to register your voice and use it at the state level.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thank you. That's kind of my next question is how folks can get involved, but is there an easy way to access some of those like templates or ways to send feedback to these agencies?
[Micah Kesselman]: Surely if you reach out to whichever progressive activist group in your city is your group of choice, someone will have a link to those script and automation pages. I don't have them off the top of my head, sorry.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: For instance, though, I've got a couple off the top of my head, Micah. Okay. So if you're interested in the Act Promoting Responsible Investments, that's being sponsored by the Massachusetts Coalition for Responsible Investment or the CFRI. So if you go online to masscfri.org, card with two R's, C-A-R-R-D dot C-O. That's just how websites work these days. They'll give you a full sort of breakdown on the bill, email template for your legislature, guide to giving public testimony if you want to do more than just a couple of clicks, and all the sort of access to emails and social media to make sure that you have as easy a time supporting this kind of work as possible. And of course, if you follow us, Medford for Palestine, on Instagram or get our emails, we share all this information out online pretty regularly, too.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. Is there anything else that you want to mention before we kind of wrap up for today?
[Micah Kesselman]: Happy New Year, everyone, as we go into the new year. I hope everyone gets a good break from things and gets to hang out with family for a little bit.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: That's all I'll mention. Yes. And, you know, while we're thinking about responsible investment, just always want to say, you know, think about buying used, the sustainability hat coming back on or not buying something at all, thinking about making and doing a kind gesture for your friends and family. It's always a lovely gift and slightly cuts out the amount of plastic that goes straight into the Pacific garbage patch.
[Unidentified]: Mm hmm.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Another player. That's such a downer. Buy something lovely or talk to a local artist. You know, yeah, we can put money back in Medford by supporting our local businesses, even if they're selling plastic sometime.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, especially trash controversy. Yeah. And the Medford's free page on Facebook is actually like a really helpful way of getting things that you need and getting rid of things that you don't in a way that's not putting them in the landfill. So I'm always impressed at how easily it is to like give and receive through that free website.
[Micah Kesselman]: join like a local like my neighborhood is a single chat group and people have like stuff like free stuff for reusing and recycling all the time on there. Some of it is like really nice stuff so like honestly it just in a self-interested mode you'll probably find some really cool stuff you like but like find your neighborhood like chat group and like just you know hang out there, get to know your neighbors, help each other out, also get some free stuff from them too.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: And that's how you get involved and work like what we do too, right? It's all about connecting locally. As we said at the top, Mike and I live like five minutes walk away from each other. I often see him when he's out jogging and he sees me walking my dog. Like it is good to be connected with the folks you live by. And I'm always grateful for like hyper-local media like this podcast that help us do that connection work too. So thanks, Daniel.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you both. Yeah. Thanks for your time again. And, um, thanks for your hard work on all of these things.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Yeah. We'll come back anytime you want us. Hopefully there's more exciting news. We'll talk soon.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome. Thanks so much.
[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Giedonis. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Medford Bites. Medford Bites. Good job.