[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. Thanks so much for being here with me today. If you don't mind introducing yourself just with your name, pronouns, and who you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, my name's Chris Oates, he, him. I'm running for state representative for the 34th Middlesex District. So that's Somerville, kind of Winter Hill, Ten Hills, Teal Square, West Somerville, South Medford, and then just north of the Mystic River, kind of around Wegmans, up to Riverside. And yeah, running for office and happy to talk about why I'm doing that, what I hope to accomplish, and hopefully why the good people of Medford and Somerville vote for me.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks, Chris. And we'll get more into your campaign in just a moment. But before we do, I just want to ask you the question that I ask everybody on the podcast, which is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford? And what do you like to eat there?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I hope this counts. because Colette in South Medford, it's not like a restaurant, but it is amazing. And it is right on the way to the playground. And so oftentimes, me and my four-year-old, when we're going to the playground, he calls it the tickety-tock playground, because they've got like a big clock in there. He says, he's like, I want to go to the green cookie store. Because we went there once, he had a green macaron. And so he insists on going there, basically, whenever. I do not do the loop around to avoid it. And for me, the favorite thing is either a Pan-Horizon or a Cuagamon. That's what he usually gets the macaron. I get that. One time he did ask for like a big passion fruit pastry that he ate like half of and that sugar high went him, sent him for the rest of the day. But it's an amazing place. So yeah, that's, that'd be my number one.
[Danielle Balocca]: That passion fruit pastry is my wife's favorite. And we never get out of there, like, without spending a jillion dollars. But my son can, like, put down a whole loaf of sourdough from Colette's, which is maybe one of the healthiest things to eat. So we'll take a trip there. Yeah, it definitely counts. We get Goldilocks a bunch. And I feel like if Goldilocks counts, Colette goes, it's got to count. Well, thank you. So, yeah. So we're here to talk about your campaign. You're running to replace Christine Barber's seat. Is that correct?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm running to follow her. I don't know if you can replace her. I'm running to follow her.
[Danielle Balocca]: Very diplomatic there. Yeah, so if you could just tell us a little bit about what helped you decide to run and kind of what's led you to this moment right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my background is in policy. I got a PhD in international relations. I thought I was going to go into the foreign service, but instead got a job in a political risk firm, which is basically forecasting what's going on in geopolitics, macroeconomics at the national level. So like right now, all my former colleagues are trying to figure out what's going on with the straits of Hormuz and like what's going on with the energy markets. But when I was in that job, I started paying more and more attention to state level government because So many of the issues that we were talking about, that's where they were first being debated. And the old line of states being the laboratories of democracy, I think is true in a lot of areas. So I was covering that more, but I didn't feel like I was involved enough. So I joined the Ranked Choice Voting campaign here in Massachusetts for the 2020 cycle, because I thought, There's so many issues, and we don't really debate them at the state level. In Massachusetts, we have the least competitive legislature in the country. So a lot of things either get ignored, or they all at once are passed. But we don't have the kind of debates that we should have in elections. So I worked on that campaign. I saw how Beacon Hill is full of really talented people, but often the culture means that you don't have that kind of openness. So when that campaign was over, I created a software company to bring more transparency to government. And at the same time, and I don't recommend this for anyone doing a startup, my son was born. And so don't do a startup at the same time as you have an infant. That's a terrible idea, I've learned. But so I was, you know, my wife's a doctor, so I was the primary caregiver. And I would like during the day, be working on my startup, still doing consulting work on political risk, you know, talking about what I think the state should be doing. And then I would pick my son up, I would give him his dinner, I'd check the news, and like nothing would have happened at the statehouse that day. And that would just go on and on and on. And so when I heard that Rep. Barber was going for the state Senate, I thought, You know, I think there's a chance to really bring more urgency to the statehouse. The next person has to do that the next person has to be able to tackle issues from housing to education to energy but like actually do it not just talk about it not just say that, and certainly say that to get elected and then coast for the next 20 years, which we know happens in some districts in Massachusetts. And so I thought if I know I can do the job and I know I have a vision that I think the voters in my district agree with, then I owe it to my neighbors to give them a choice of who to elect. And so that's what the campaign is, basically going around to the neighborhoods, talking to people about what I want to accomplish up there. And if they agree with me, hopefully, you know, asking for their vote.
[Danielle Balocca]: The word you used was like, the legislator is the least competitive in the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Why do you think that is? And like, what exactly does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is based on a, there's a site called Ballotpedia, which is like Wikipedia for elections, and they have annual rankings of the competitiveness of the legislature. In 2024, I believe it was about two-thirds of all races were completely uncontested, meaning that in May, you know who is going to be sworn in the next January. And I think there's a couple reasons. And this year, I think there's a little bit more competition, but it's still the majority of legislators are running unopposed. And there's even a couple people going for open seats unopposed. So there's a couple that I've seen that, yeah, they're the only person on the ballot. And I can tell you from my experience, it is very different. I've obviously never run uncontested, but it is tough running against other people, because you have to really put in the work. You have to knock on doors, show up to every event. You really have to think about what the policy should be. And you give voters a chance to influence you, to say, this is actually a big deal. So being competitive is not just about people get a choice of their representative, but making the representatives work for it. Why we don't have it? I think there's a bunch of reasons. One is that the nationalization of politics means that a lot of folks think of themselves as Republicans or Democrats because of what's going on in Washington, and therefore we don't have the kind of granularity here in Massachusetts, because there's a lot of different flavors of Democrat in Massachusetts. but if you're all just under one umbrella, it can seem like, well, you know, I'm, I'm a Democrat because of what's going on in DC. And so that's who I'm going to vote for. So you kind of have that. Partisan flattening out of the differences we have I think also it's hard to run, you know You have to ask your friends and families for money You got to spend a lot of days knocking on doors and kind of what's the point if? You feel like there's not gonna be a lot of competition So I think it's a self-perpetuating thing the idea that you might not have a lot of power up there you might not be able to influence things means a lot of people don't run and because a lot of people don't run that means it doesn't change it and yeah, I think there's no one reason but if you can change a few things and just have a different culture around like, I'm going to run on this and I expect to be able to try to implement that or I expect to be able to talk about it, then you can start opening that up and bring a bit more, again, a bit more urgency to the system.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, it's, I think, you know, talking to rep Barbara last time on the podcast, I think it would be easy for people to sort of ignore the work of the state reps that, and like you're saying, like campaigning for state reps sounds hard, like we're used to talking to city councilors, school committee members that are campaigning in their own cities, which also still seems very hard. It takes a lot of resources, right? So if you're campaigning in a broader area, that seems really difficult. But I do think that lots of people don't really think about our state reps and what they do. And why I was really struck by talking to Rep. Barber was how much she's been able to accomplish in her time in that position. And so I guess, could you say a little bit more about why this race is so important?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I'd say first, the state government handles a lot of stuff that we think cities or the federal government should do. So if you care about housing, for example, which is at the moment probably the top thing that I get when knocking on doors, a lot of folks ask their city councilors about, this housing development, that housing development, and city councilors definitely have a role in the specifics of zoning. But the reason that housing in Massachusetts is so expensive is that as a state, or at the very least as the greater Boston area, we have not built enough housing over decades. And that can only be done at the state level. We can only reform the zoning laws we need, the construction codes we need, the permitting codes we need at the state level. And there's been for some years, and I think unfortunately still this year at the statehouse, there's been a sense in some areas like it's not our problem. you know, yes, Medford and Somerville and Boston and Cambridge, yeah, they're dealing with high housing prices, but we here in the suburbs, you know, we might not be. Or at least the people that show up to, you know, the events here might not be struggling with that. And so there is this sense that We ignore what's going on at the state level oftentimes because we don't realize they have the power to change it. And that also involves energy policy. So one of the reasons your electricity bills are probably so high is that, again, for decades we have not built the kind of energy supplies we need. We make it really hard to do battery storage, to do new solar. We just managed to get a transmission line to Quebec for hydropower from Quebec, but that took a while. That was partially Maine's fault. Sorry, that was almost entirely Maine's fault. But there are things that the state can do around these issues that we often don't even realize they have that power. I think the first thing is that this race matters because the state has a lot of power. But I also think this race matters in our area because not to not to brag too much about Medford and Somerville, but we are two very active cities. There's a lot of energy here. And if we don't have a representative who can lead at the statehouse and can lead on the kind of policy that we care about, we're probably not going to get those things let on. So if we have a representative who maybe doesn't have the respect of leadership or isn't respected by their colleagues and is seen as just kind of being there, rather than being a force for change. We've really missed an opportunity statewide to have the kind of progressive reforms that we want to be enacted. And I think that would be a real shame if we missed that opportunity.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, yeah, and kind of building off that, what would your hopes be in terms of like your priorities in this position?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd say definitely housing and statewide zoning reform. Like if there's one part of the housing There's obviously so many things involving housing that you could tackle. But for me, if I had to choose just one, it would be statewide zoning reform, because I think it's what this position has a unique ability to do. On energy, it would be incentivizing battery storage, because that helps more solar panels become more effective, because you can store the energy for longer. And again, it's the sort of thing where it unlocks a lot of other stuff. And then one thing that I would really like to focus on, and I don't see anyone talking about it, is that our school systems are going to face a real decline in students over the next 20 years, because we know the birth rates are falling. All of the 18 year olds, 18 years from now have already been born. So we can model out kind of what the school age population is gonna be over the next 20 years. And it's going to be down. It's going to be down in some areas between 10 and 35 percent across the state. And, you know, what does that mean for our school systems? Are we, you know, we're building a new Medford High. Is that going to be a Medford High that we don't really need in 20 years or 30 years, the same number of of rooms if we have fewer students, and there's going to be a real disruption across the state about school regionalization or consolidation, as we have these fixed costs that are now spread among smaller students or do we see it as an opportunity to have smaller class sizes. and to allow students to have even better facilities because they're not going to be as crowded. And that's the sort of thing that I can already hear people maybe switching off the podcast because it sounds boring, long-term student enrollment trends. But if we can get ahead of that now, we're not going to have headlines 10 or 20 years from now of the crisis in our schools as declining enrollments mean that towns are laying off teachers or they're shutting schools. So it's one of those things where we know it's coming we know it's going to be really important and the legislature needs to be working on that now even if it's not that important even if it's not that critical you know time sensitive at the moment it's going to be in the future and you know we really need to have serious legislators who are willing to do the work 10 years in advance because you know my son's four years old and I don't want him to going going to high school when everyone's now talking about, we need to cut teachers' salaries, we need to cut the school budgets, because we don't have the same number of students. So yes, it's a long-term thing, but we need to start working on it right now.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that became really obvious in talking to Ref Weber, was how long some of these changes take. So being able to think ahead in that way feels really helpful. What about any short-term, what would be your first act of business if you were elected?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think one of the first things that you do when you get elected, you file a bunch of legislation. So going to be talking with folks basically from September 2nd, the day after the primary, to inauguration about what those should be. And there's going to be a mix of big ones. So for example, I think we should change our electoral system to what they have in Alaska, which is top four in an open primary, then ranked choice voting. So that would be one of them. That's kind of a big institutional change. Down to smaller things like eliminating non-compete agreements, which is holding back our entrepreneurial ecosystem. It means that a lot of people, when they leave jobs, feel like they can't start a new job or even they can't start their own new business. So that's a small thing, but I think there is appetite to fix it. and kind of everything in between. So one thing I definitely want to do over the course of this campaign and what I'm doing now is if you have an idea of something that the state should be fixing, especially if it's small, and you think that a committee chair wouldn't have the time for it, send it to me. I'm going to be putting together basically a menu of this type of stuff to try to implement that. One of the best examples is happy hour. Should be, I think, re-legalized. And just no one wants to kind of take take the initiative. But that's the sort of stuff that I am, I think, a first-term representative who really cares about happy hour, even though I do have a four-year-old, so I have not been to a happy hour in many years, four years to be precise. I think you can actually fix that. And it's a small thing, but you add a lot of small things up, and they make a real change in the quality of life here.
[Danielle Balocca]: Chris, you could go to a happy hour if they existed. That's like the perfect time to have a drink right before bedtime.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I would go. He would be sprinting around the bar. So I think unless we were there with a tablet with some Daniel Tiger on it, it would not be worth it. Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: It's a good point. Yeah, so it sounds like you're really looking for feedback from the community about what people want to see in terms of change or what the issues are that they're noticing. Anything else that you want to make sure that you mention today?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the most important thing is going around the district, talking to voters. people don't often understand just how possible change is. I think we assume at the national level, like you need to have millions of dollars in ads and you need to wait two years for the midterms. Here in Massachusetts, if there's an issue you care about, find a coalition that already exists, an advocacy group. So for example, on housing, it could be Abundant Housing Massachusetts. You sign up for their mailing list, you hear when you need to go to the statehouse to lobby your legislators, or you can just write an email, but people tend to be more open than you would think. And even though change is difficult, the way that we start is one voter at a time. And so if you see me on the streets, just tell me, like tell me what you think is going wrong. Because obviously I have my own ideas. I've studied a lot of the policies a lot, but there are things that I'm not going to know about. Because maybe it happened to you at your work or it happened to your kid who lives in the Berkshires, but you think that the state should be dealing with it. The more information you can send me, the better of a job I can do representing you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks, Chris. And how can people get involved in your campaign if they're interested? Are there any kind of events that you have coming up?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so chrisoats.org is the website to go to to sign up for the mailing list. We'll tell you about the events. We're going to have a big campaign kickoff later this month at the Great American Beer Hall, as soon as I can lock down what date that's going to be, probably June 28th. And one thing that we're going to be doing as well and afterwards is a big project about thinking about what Massachusetts might look like in 2040. And that's something that I've done for my work. I did it for the European Parliament. I've done it for some businesses, kind of thinking long term, building different scenarios of the future. But what we want to do, and it's way overkill for a state rep campaign. A lot of people told me it's a waste of time. But I think it's really important because thinking about the future and the different ways that it could go from a world where things are more affordable, less affordable, where AI is taking jobs, where AI is helping people be more productive, is it gets people in the mindset of thinking long-term, what is it that we need to do right now? And what I hope to use it is hopefully if I'm elected, to talk with my colleagues about, you know, if we are, you know, 14 years from now, we are in a world where houses are still unaffordable, but a lot of people have lost their jobs from AI, what kind of legislation do we need to pass, and how do we start working on that right now? So that's going to be open to everyone, and we're going to encourage people to send in their ideas, send in what they think matters. On our website, we'll have a lot more about how to get involved in that. But we want you to be involved building what you think the future might be so that then we can start discussing what is the legislation we need to either make sure that future comes to pass, if it's a good one, or mitigate some of the damage if it's a bad scenario.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. And so my last question for you is, since we mentioned the competitiveness of the legislature in Massachusetts, how do you think you set yourself apart from the other candidates in this race?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's because my background is working in policy and covering lots of different policy areas. I had a job as a, basically I was editing North America and Australia for a daily newsletter on geopolitics and macroeconomics. So like in the course of a morning, I might write about, you know, offshore wind, US forces, military forces in Sub-Saharan Africa, and like a trade policy. So I'm used to dealing with a lot of different things. And I think what I tried to take into this race when I started, as I said, I want to build a campaign that actually reflects how I would govern. So I'm not going to promise stuff that I don't think I can deliver. I'm not the type of person that's going to say, we're going to do these 20 things, then you add up them. And you're like, oh, that would be twice the state budget. So obviously, you're not going to do that. And I don't want to also just promise things that sound good but wouldn't actually solve the problem. So for example, on housing, there's a lot of different things we can do on housing. And not everyone wants statewide zoning. Otherwise, it would have passed already. But I think that that is the most important aspect of unlocking a lot of other stuff. So that's what I want to talk about. So I'm really trying to go in this thinking, not necessarily what polls well, what plays well, what gets me the most votes. But if I were elected, I could go to my colleagues and say, this would be really important to implement. And I've already talked about it with the voters. had that disagreement, so had that disagreement or agreement. So, you know, it might be the harder way to get elected because I'm not just gonna tell people what they wanna hear, but I think it is the only way to honestly represent people to, in a campaign, say, here's what I believe, here's your option for me, and if you like that, then I can go to others in the House and the Senate and say, this actually is not only the right thing to do, but it has the support of the people in my district.
[Danielle Balocca]: And what about other folks in the race who may already have some local political experience? It sounds like you have a great other experience in the broader politics. But what do you feel about how you might be competitive with folks in the race that already have held local office?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think local office is really important, but a lot of the issues at the state are not the issues that get talked about at a city council or a school committee meeting. So for example, when we're talking about, again, statewide zoning or how we pass data privacy laws or what we're gonna deal with economically if the biotech sector starts to move to North Carolina or Indiana or other states, those are things that have to be done at the state level. So that's kind of where my background is, is talking about the issues, that are the things that I'm going to be governing on. So you're right, I don't have the, I might not have the name recognition, well, I don't have the name recognition, and I don't have the experience of being in office, but I have, I believe, the most experience in this race of the issues that we're actually gonna be dealing with in this job.
[Danielle Balocca]: Okay, well, thanks, Chris. Anything else you wanna mention before we wrap up?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the most important thing is that if you want to get involved in the race, you can. We're always looking for people to knock on doors, to phone bank. And so chrisouts.org, you can get involved. And even if all you want to do is write me an email telling me that I'm wrong about everything, I'd appreciate those too. The more feedback, the more involvement from the community, the better. Because ultimately, that's what democracy is supposed to be. It's supposed to be not a game for insiders. It shouldn't be a club for people who are already in the system. It should be if you care about your community, your commonwealth, your country, you can join a campaign and you can get involved and you can make some change for the better.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great. Well, thank you so much, Chris.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: And good luck.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
[Danielle Balocca]: The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Daniel Malacca and Charlie Cashman. Music is made by Hendrik Idenes. 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 re-interview the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Medford Bites. Good job.